NEW YORK – The National Institutes of Health announced on Tuesday that it has provided $9.7 million in two-year awards to 26 research projects using data from the All of Us Research Program to support new analyses and tool development.
The awards expand All of Us' Extramural Program to Advance Research (EPAR) and fund investigations into heart disease risk factors, chronic pain, intersectional mental health challenges, and genetic risk factors for different cancers, among others.
One grant for $253,500 from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, for example, was awarded to Samira Asgari of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York to investigate genetic and other determinants of infectious disease susceptibility in diverse populations.
Other awards are going towards developing new models and tools for data analysis or towards testing novel uses of existing methods. For instance, Alexej Abyzov of the Mayo Clinic at Rochester was awarded $161,400 by the National Institute on Aging to develop research methods for discovering and analyzing age-associated copy number variants.
All tools and methods developed under these grants will be made available to All of Us investigators through the Researcher Workbench, following the award period.
The Researcher Workbench is a cloud-based platform that registered researchers can use to access registered and controlled-tier data as well as to form collaborations.
"We are maximizing the contributions our participants make to advance research by supporting the development of world-class tools that can be used to explore the data and accelerate medical research," Sheri Schully, deputy chief medical and scientific officer of the All of Us program, said in a statement.
Funding for these grants comes from All of Us, the National Eye Institute, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the National Library of Medicine, the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, and the Office of Data Science Strategy.