Researchers Gather Health Data For 'All Of Us'
By Richard Harris,
NPR
| 12. 31. 2017
Federal taxpayers are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a quest for blood samples, medical information and fitness readouts from a million Americans. It's called the All of Us precision medicine initiative, and it's the biggest push ever mounted to create a huge public pool of data that scientists — and anybody else who is interested — can mine for clues about health and disease.
Proponents say this big data approach to medicine will be revolutionary. Critics aren't so sure.
The plan is to recruit a million Americans to sign up for a program that will not only gather all sorts of medical data about them but will also follow them for at least a decade, possibly much longer. Their electronic medical records could end up in huge databases. The physical samples of blood and urine will end up in an industrial park in Rochester, Minn.
Mine Cicek, an assistant professor of laboratory medicine and pathology at the Mayo Clinic, leads me into a vast building with more than an acre and a half of floor space. "This...
Related Articles
By Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic | 03.18.2024
People are discovering the truth about their biological parents with DNA—and learning that incest is far more common than many think.
When Steve Edsel was a boy, his adoptive parents kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings in their bedroom closet...
By Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review | 03.20.2024
There is a new most expensive drug ever—a gene therapy that costs as much as a Brooklyn brownstone or a Miami mansion, and more than the average person will earn in a lifetime.
Lenmeldy is a gene treatment for metachromatic...
By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times | 03.10.2024
In 1889, a French doctor named Francois-Gilbert Viault climbed down from a mountain in the Andes, drew blood from his arm and inspected it under a microscope. Dr. Viault’s red blood cells, which ferry oxygen, had surged 42 percent. He...
By Nick Paul Taylor, BioSpace | 03.14.2024
A U.K. watchdog balked at the cost-effectiveness of Vertex Pharmaceuticals’ CRISPR-based sickle cell disease therapy Thursday, recommending against funding the treatment unless uncertainties can be cleared up satisfactorily.
The U.K. became the first country to authorize Vertex’s Casgevy (exagamglogene...