Verily managing data from NIH’s 10 year, 1M patient ‘precision health’ research program

In 2015, President Obama announced the Precision Medicine Initiative to research individualized health care. Today, that All of Us program is officially launching and open for enrollment. With several components, Verily will be working on storing and organizing data for researchers.

Run by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, All of Us is targeting one million participants with the program running for at least 10 years. For comparison, the Alphabet division’s somewhat similar Project Baseline longitudinal study is slated to span four years with 10,000 participants.

Given Google’s forte in storing data and recent moves into offering cloud health services, Verily — along with Vanderbilt University and the Broad Institute — is responsible for storing collected patient information, which includes vitals, electronic health records, and bodily samples.

The health data we gather from participants will be stored in a database. Approved researchers can access this data to explore how factors like environment, lifestyle, and genes, can impact health. This may help develop new medical treatments that are unique to individuals, and enable a future of precision medicine for all of us.

Verily and its partners are also tasked with making this data available to researchers. This requires creating “state-of-the-art tools and techniques for securing, cleaning, and storing participant data,” as well as analysis software, graphic browsers, database queries, and custom code.

We will provide an online workbench that allows researchers to explore how different factors — like environment, lifestyle, and genes — contribute to individual health.

Meanwhile, the broader research program hopes to make this dataset available to “a vibrant community of traditional and non-traditional researchers,” including individual citizen scientists and PhD researchers at large institution.

Those interested in the All of Us research program can learn more and sign-up here.

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