So really what is the All of Us Research Program?

Saturday today and I was stopped in my tracks to finish my chores several times. Tomorrow (Sunday) is the big launch. The big launch of what, they asked? They were messaging me all over the place on social media. Just google it, I said.

It finally is here - the big day, May 6 where NIH is engaged in the national launch of the program that has been in gestation so far for several months with thousands of beta participants. The program aims to enroll one million participants to volunteer their data and other information so researchers can use it to improve medicine.

I had no idea of this program until the middle of last year when I came across Vibrent (based in NoVA) and met its CEO, Dr Praduman Jain who later went on to explain the benefits and goals of Precision Medicine very passionately to me. And then it finally dawned on me. 

Well that was then. Fast forward almost four months and here we are. We have been so busy building up the functionality and infrastructure for the program that it has been all to easy to forget what the program is about!

A few months ago, I read an article by Chris Anderson, former editor in chief of Wired magazine, that I thought applied very well here: “The end of theory: the data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete” (http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory/). As the title indicates, Anderson asserted that in the era of petabyte information and supercomputing, the traditional, hypothesis‐driven scientific method would become obsolete. No more theories or hypotheses, no more discussions whether the experimental results refute or support the original hypotheses. In this new era, what counts are sophisticated algorithms and statistical tools to sift through a massive amount of data to find information that could be turned into knowledge (source: NIH).

The All of Us Research Program can be instrumental in this process. Today, scientific research happens in the laboratory. A sample or specimen is observed, tests developed and then trials are done before getting approvals and mass rollout. This is still the wide majority of cases. Behavioral scientists have obviously been using data for their research regularly and there are few cases where actual patient data was used to build out a specific medicine formula that was then given to them. The All of Us Research Program has the potential not only to lower the costs of research in medicine but also to increase the efficacy of medicine.

Consider the long tail problem in developing medicines. The All of Us Research program can have a huge impact on solving this issue. If I was to give an analogy, this program has the ability to do what fiber optic cables did for the internet. I am not talking about the stock market crash of 1999 ! I am referring to the immense large possibilities of breaking down and then solving a very complex and large problem. Imagine what kind of collaboration you could get if this kind of data is available across national boundaries and what if it can be used and compared on demand by researchers all over the globe? This could completely democratize the problem of finding cures for diseases and help develop a very competitive market for medicines in the next 20-30 years. Hopefully that happens in my lifetime!

PS: This blog describes my person viewpoint on the All of Us Program. For the official definition or for signing up for the program, please visit the NIH Join All of Us website or download the apps from the App Store or Play Store. If you are interested in the crazy engineering that goes behind building this, join Vibrent Health. We are on the lookout for passionate (and crazy) engineers that want to change the world.