NEW YORK — The National Institutes of Health said on Tuesday that it has earmarked nearly $4.8 million in grant funding this fiscal year to support the analysis of data from the All of Us Research Program, as well as the development of new data analysis tools and methods.
The All of Us program, a landmark precision medicine initiative launched in mid-2018, began releasing genetic results for ancestry and a small number of nonclinical genetic traits in late 2020. The first set of genomic data for researchers was made available early last year — including nearly 100,000 whole-genome sequences and participants' electronic health record information — via the initiative's cloud-based All of Us Researcher Workbench portal.
Ahead of the next planned release of additional All of Us data later this year, the NIH has announced two new funding opportunities. Under the first, the NIH will provide up to roughly $2.4 million to fund projects that will use well-accepted analytical tools and methods to analyze the data within the Researcher Workbench. Under the second, the NIH will commit up to around $2.3 million in research grants focused on developing and disseminating new analytical methods, models, and tools to analyze Researcher Workbench data.
All funded projects are expected to be completed within two years.
"Since opening to researchers in May 2020, the Researcher Workbench has served as a springboard for discovery and collaboration," Geoffrey Ginsburg, chief medical and scientific officer of All of Us, said in a statement. "With this new funding, we are looking to inspire new research aligned with NIH institutes' strategic interests."