All of Us
Got a Great Research Idea? “All of Us” Wants to Hear It!
One of the boldest undertakings that NIH has ever attempted, the All of Us Research Program has been hard at work in a “beta” testing phase, and is now busy gearing up for full recruitment in the spring. This historic effort will enroll 1 million or more people in the United States to share information about their health, habits, and what it’s like where they live. This information will be part of a resource that scientists can use to accelerate research and improve health. How? By taking into account individual differences in lifestyle, environment, and biology, researchers will uncover paths toward realizing the full potential of precision medicine.
Before embarking on this adventure, All of Us is reaching out to prospective researchers, community organizations, and citizen scientists—including people just like you—to get their input. Imagine that the project has already enrolled 1 million participants from all over the country and from diverse backgrounds. Imagine that they have all agreed to make available their electronic health records, to put on wearable sensors that can track body physiology and environmental exposures, and to provide blood samples for lab testing, including DNA analysis. Is there a particular research question that you think All of Us could help answer? Possible topics include risks of disease, factors that promote wellness, and research on human behavior, prevention, exercise, genetics, environmental health effects, health disparities, and more. To submit an idea, just go to this special All of Us web page.
Tags: All of Us, All of Us Research Program, citizen science, clinical research, crowdsourcing, IdeaScale, personalized medicine, precision medicine, Precision Medicine Initiative, wearable biosensors
Creative Minds: Designing Personalized Clinical Trials
Karina Davidson/Jörg Meyer
It might have been 25 years ago, but Karina Davidson remembers that day like yesterday. She was an intern in clinical psychology, and two concerned parents walked into the hospital with their troubled, seven-year-old son. The boy was severely underweight at just 37 pounds and had been acting out violently toward himself and others. It seemed as though Ritalin, a drug commonly prescribed for Attention Deficit Disorder, might help. But would it?
To find out, the clinical team did something unconventional: they designed for the boy a clinical trial to test the benefit of Ritalin versus a placebo. The boy was randomly assigned to take either the drug or placebo each day for four weeks. As a controlled study, neither clinical staff nor the family knew whether he was taking the drug or placebo at any given time. The result: Ritalin wasn’t the answer. The boy was spared any side effects from long term administration of a medication that wouldn’t help him, and his doctors could turn to other potentially more beneficial approaches to his treatment.
Davidson, now an established clinical psychologist at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, New York, wants to take the unconventional approach that helped this boy and make it more of the norm in medicine. With support from a 2017 NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award, she and her colleagues will develop three pilot computer applications—or digital platforms—to help doctors conduct one-person studies in their offices.
Posted In: Health, Science, technology
Tags: 2017 NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award, All of Us, clinical trials, diabetes, digital platform, exercise, high blood pressure, light therapy, melatonin, N-of-1 trials, pain, personalized medicine, precision medicine, standard care, weight loss
Missing Genes Point to Possible Drug Targets
Every person’s genetic blueprint, or genome, is unique because of variations that occasionally occur in our DNA sequences. Most of those are passed on to us from our parents. But not all variations are inherited—each of us carries 60 to 100 “new mutations” that happened for the first time in us. Some of those variations can knock out the function of a gene in ways that lead to disease or other serious health problems, particularly in people unlucky enough to have two malfunctioning copies of the same gene. Recently, scientists have begun to identify rare individuals who have loss-of-function variations that actually seem to improve their health—extraordinary discoveries that may help us understand how genes work as well as yield promising new drug targets that may benefit everyone.
In a study published in the journal Nature, a team partially funded by NIH sequenced all 18,000 protein-coding genes in more than 10,500 adults living in Pakistan [1]. After finding that more than 17 percent of the participants had at least one gene completely “knocked out,” researchers could set about analyzing what consequences—good, bad, or neutral—those loss-of-function variations had on their health and well-being.
Tags: All of Us, All of Us Research Program, APOC3, cardiology, cholesterol, DNA, drug development, drug targets, gene knockouts, gene mutations, genetics, genomics, heart attack, heart disease, human knockout, myocardial infarction, Pakistan, Pakistan Rise of Myocardial Infarction Study, PLA2G7, triglycerides
Happy New Year: Looking Back at 2016 Research Highlights
Happy New Year! While everyone was busy getting ready for the holidays, the journal Science announced its annual compendium of scientific Breakthroughs of the Year. If you missed it, the winner for 2016 was the detection of gravitational waves—tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime created by the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago! It’s an incredible discovery, and one that Albert Einstein predicted a century ago.
Among the nine other advances that made the first cut for Breakthrough of the Year, several involved the biomedical sciences. As I’ve done in previous years (here and here), I’ll kick off this New Year by taking a quick look of some of the breakthroughs that directly involved NIH support:
Tags: 2016, Africa, aging, All of Us, astronaut, atherosclerosis, Breakthroughs of 2016, Breakthroughs of the Year, chronic kidney disease, custom-designed proteins, designer proteins, DNA analysis, DNA sequencing, embryos, evolution, genomic analysis, genomics, hemagglutinin, human development, human embyos, human evolution, human migration, International Space Station, kidney dysfunction, longevity, nanopore sequencing, osteoarthritis, Out of Africa, portable laboratories, precision medicine, Precision Medicine Initiative, proteins, pulmonary fibrosis, Science's Breakthroughs of the Year, senescent cells, senolytic drugs, Simons Genome Diversity Project, universal flu vaccine, Zika vaccine
