04 May Nationwide effort to personalize medicine kicks off

Posted at 15:39h in All of Us, Health Equity, Precision Health by

‘All of Us’ Research Program to build genetic library

By Shamane Mills, Wisconsin Public Radio

A nationwide effort to better tailor medicine to patients’ needs kicks off Sunday. The All of Us Research Program will collect blood and urine samples from volunteers across the country to create a medical database of 1 million people.

Two Wisconsin medical schools — the University of Wisconsin Medical School and the Medical College of Wisconsin — and Marshfield Clinic are sharing a $5.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to recruit research participants.

“Medicine, by necessity, has been built by trying to identify what works for the average person. But we are all different. And one-size-fits-all is far from an optimal strategy,” explained Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health.

The goal is to have between 70 and 75 percent be people who have been under-represented in past research. The program wants a mix of rural and urban, race, ethnicity, gender, education, and physical and mental disabilities. Read more …