SC Connecticut News

Researchers at Yale University have been awarded a $5.6 million grant for the first year of a five-year project to establish the Coast-to-Coast Consortium (C2C) and further their pioneering efforts with the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) All of Us Research Program. Yale will lead the new consortium to enhance participant enrollment and engagement across seven organizations.

The award is designated to facilitate participant engagement, enrollment, data collection, and retention. C2C will build on the foundation set by the California Precision Medicine Consortium (CAPMC), established in 2018, which enrolled more than 65,500 participants in the program.

This award follows the All of Us program's recent achievement of returning personalized health-related DNA results to more than 100,000 participants. Returning results involves examining specific genes associated with serious health conditions such as hereditary cancers and heart disease. Through this process, the program observed 32,500 DNA variants. More than 7,000 of these variants had never been observed among people who had previously undergone genetic testing.

Lucila Ohno-Machado, MD, PhD, MBA, deputy dean for biomedical informatics and chair of biomedical informatics and data science at Yale School of Medicine, emphasized the significance of this milestone: "The All of Us Program provides an unprecedented opportunity to include diverse populations in large-scale genomic research. By including individuals from historically underrepresented communities, we can uncover insights into genetic variations that may have been overlooked in the past, ultimately leading to more equitable healthcare for all."

Yale collaborates with C2C partners including the University of California campuses at San Diego, Davis, and San Francisco; Cedars-Sinai Medical Center; the University of Southern California; and the Puerto Rico Consortium for Clinical Investigation. This network is committed to advancing biomedical research and innovation.

Since its inception, Yale's All of Us team has enrolled more than 500 local participants in the program with an impressive 81% representation from underrepresented racial or ethnic minorities. This diversity enriches the dataset and ensures that research findings are applicable and beneficial to all populations.

Recruitment for All of Us is ongoing. Volunteers must be at least 18 years old and can represent any gender, race, ethnicity or cultural background. Participants are invited to an initial in-person visit lasting between 30 minutes to an hour with regular online updates regarding health and lifestyle in subsequent months and years.

With continuing efforts to expand participation, the All of Us Research Program aims to create a diverse dataset that will drive transformative biomedical research discoveries for all populations. More than 800,000 individuals have joined this effort so far. Participants share data from biosamples, survey responses, physical measurements, electronic health records (EHRs), and wearable devices which are made available through the program’s Researcher Workbench.

More than 75% of All of Us participants self-identify with communities historically underrepresented in medical research while about 45% identify with a racial or ethnic minority group.

To learn more or enroll visit JoinAllofUs.org/Yale.

The All of Us Research Program’s Coast-to-Coast Consortium at Yale University is funded by NIH award OT2OD037644.

___