The Dish - How is the all of us research program unique?

We've had the great opportunity to learn from some giants in the large cohort research programs which is kind of what the All of Us Research Program is as well, but I'm hoping that we're gonna give back to that community as well because we are trying some bold new things that quite frankly are kind of unprecedented at the scale and diversity of things we're aiming for the fences in with this study. There's kind of four areas, I mean people ask me how are you kind of unique, and I said the first is really the diversity of people that we're trying to bring into this large cohort program. Getting geographic diversity, people from all walks of life, all around the country is fundamental to the science that we want to be able to do. As is, people with a mix of health status, so not too many people of one disease versus another, but a real wide range of people, including many of people who are healthy, as well as demographics, right, we are focused on under represented in biomedical research. Those age groups, those people living in rural communities, most races and ethnicities who have been kind of left behind from traditional biomedical research, pulling them in so we have new scientific data and understanding. And learning how to do a diverse cohort like that will be a learning not just for us, but all of our partners, and future partners that you can imagine. The second is really participant centeredness, and this has been done on many smaller scale studies, but never at the scale of one million people. We are inviting participants to sit on our governance and help decide which direction should we go in. Participate, and brainstorm about the science and the health conditions that matter to their communities that they want this resource to help facilitate. Not only that but we are committed to giving information back to participants, very few studies do this because it's hard, it's expensive, it's ethically challenging, but it's the right thing to do. You deserve the data that we capture about you. You deserve information about your own health. The other pieces of this are like innovation of very new things that haven't been done at this large before. One of those is whole genome sequencing. There are many studies starting to do whole genome sequencing, but putting in and saying "Hey, we're gonna do this for a million people." Just the data size of this creates enormous cost and challenges just to store your data in a secure and safe place. The others are kind of like, "Hey, there's all these mobile phones out there, we're starting to use them in some scientific studies." "There's all of these apps and things." "Is the data coming from your fitness wearable really useful for research?" We're tackling that problem head on and the learnings that we have will help many of those who come after us. And the last piece of this is our accessibility as a program to researchers. We are making an open resource available to everyone. All kinds of researchers from citizen scientists to the top academic schools that you see sometimes winning Nobel Prizes. We want everybody. The more sort of brain power per problem that scientists can bring to this, the better. And opening up that data, and really making it easy for lots of people to use, I believe will help accelerate the science and the breakthroughs that we as patients are all desperately waiting for.