The National Institutes of Health said on Thursday that it has committed $170 million over the next five years to fund a study into how genetics and other factors can inform personalized nutrition recommendations.
Called the Nutrition for Precision Health powered by the All of Us Research Program (NPH), the initiative aims to recruit a diverse group of 10,000 participants in the All of Us Research Program who agree to provide their genomic data, linked electronic health records, and other health information for analysis. The NPH aims to ultimately develop algorithms that can predict individual responses to food and dietary routines.
NPH data will also be integrated into the All of Us Researcher Workbench, a computational platform for data analysis and collaboration for program researchers, and be made available to the wider scientific community, the NIH said.
"We know that nutrition, just like medicine, isn’t one-size-fits-all," Holly Nicastro, an NPH coordinator, said in a statement. "NPH will take into account an individual's genetics, gut microbes, and other lifestyle, biological, environmental, or social factors to help each individual develop eating recommendations that improve overall health."
The NIH said that the funding, which is subject to availability, will be used to establish a consortium of research groups including six clinical centers, a dietary assessment center, a metabolomics and clinical assays center, a microbiome and metagenomics center, a multimodal data modeling and bioinformatics center, and a research coordinating center. It will also provide additional support to existing All of Us infrastructure.
Awardees include a University of California, San Diego team that will establish the UCSD Microbiome and Metagenomics Center, which will be tasked with long-read data assembly and multiplexed metaproteomics, among other things.
Also receiving funding are groups led by investigators from the City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the University of Hawaii at Manoa; the University of California, Davis; Tufts University; the University of Alabama at Birmingham; Louisiana State University Pennington Biomedical Research Center; Northwestern University; and the Research Triangle Institute.
This story first appeared in Genomeweb.
