Tonight’s episode of the Perpetual Notion Machine looks into the All of Us Research Program, a program asking for participants to provide health data. This wealth of information will be used by medical researchers in order to speed up the research process and hopefully improve and develop treatments sooner rather than later. PNM’s Dennis Shaffer talks with Kevin Kiley, the All of Us communications specialist at UW-Madison. The program was first announced as a nationwide effort by the National Institutes of Health in 2015, and UW-Madison obtained a grant to become one of the sponsors. Kevin mentions that gathering data just started this last Spring, with a goal of getting over one million participants in the next 5 years. Participants are asked fairly general questions about their overall health, lifestyle, and environment, and they are asked to give samples of their blood and urine for testing. All the data obtained goes into a massive database, but is also kept separately by individual. And the data is kept completely secure. Besides speeding up the research process, Kevin mentions that the program is particularly seeking a diverse range of volunteers. One of the biggest problems in medical research are the differences among gender, Latinx, and African-Americans. By shifting the focus of research from the disease to the person/people/patient, then perhaps patterns emerge that could lead to new treatments at a faster rate.
For more information and to sign up for the program, go to the UW-Madison website of All of Us.
For the main website of All of Us at the National Institutes of Health, go here.
To sign up for the program, you can go directly to the Join All of Us website.
And finally another source of information is at the All of Us Research Hub.