Newsletter 2019: Q3

The All of Us Research Program is building one of the largest biomedical resources of its kind, specifically engaging volunteers who reflect the diversity of America. This resource will be available to a diverse community of researchers and the public to explore how lifestyle, environment, and biological makeup affect health and disease. 

Top News from All of Us

All of Us Detailed in the New England Journal of Medicine

Recently, the New England Journal of Medicine published a special report describing All of Us , highlighting the program’s goals and progress to date, including early successes in enrolling diverse communities and gathering multiple data types. 

Lead author Josh Denny, MD, MS said, “The paradox of precision medicine, to better treat the individual, is it takes large populations to better understand what is happening at the individual level. It is especially important that we capture diversity. About one-third of the United States is African American, Hispanic, or Native American, but only about 4% of existing genome-wide association studies cover these populations. It is important to capture this diversity and explore.” All of Us is helping fill this gap: among All of Us’ 192,000 core participants, more than 50% are races and ethnicities other than white, and more than 80% are underrepresented in biomedical research.

See the report

Read on for more updates on the All of Us Research Hub.

About the All of Us Research Hub

The All of Us Research Hub is your gateway to All of Us research data. There you can learn about the breadth of data that is being collected and curated for research, and when it will be available for researchers to analyze.

Coming Up on the Research Hub: The Researcher Workbench

We’re planning to release the beta version of the Researcher Workbench to approved researchers this winter.

What is the Workbench?
The Workbench is an analysis platform designed for approved researchers to create cohorts of individual-level participant research data, review these cohorts, and analyze and visualize the data in a Jupyter notebook using programming languages Python or R.

What will be available in the Workbench?

The winter release will include: 

  • Workspaces: Create a project workspace. Store cohorts and notebooks. Share with team members.
  • Cohort Builder: Build and review a custom dataset.
  • Notebooks: Analyze your cohort. Create graphs or tables to showcase your work.
  • NEW! Data Set Builder: Analysis-ready tables that can be exported to Notebooks

Researchers will be able to analyze the data from all 6 publicly launched surveys, electronic health records, and physical measurements using the new tools.

Details about our data access policies are forthcoming.

Other Activities

User Testing
Before its release, the Research Hub teams are testing the quality and validation of the tools. To make sure all the Research Hub tools have the end user in mind, we have been conducting user testing with researchers, teachers, participant ambassadors, data scientists, and various community members. We’ve collated feedback from these users to continuously improve the Workbench before its release to the public. We want to ensure we are creating the best product we can with all types of researchers in mind. 

Demonstration Projects
We also are working with the All of Us consortium on a series of demonstration projects to show the quality and utility of the All of Us data and research tools. These projects will help validate the All of Us database and replicate some known risk associations, like the association between smoking and cancer. We will share more information about these projects and any resulting publications as they become available.

In the meantime, check out our Data Snapshots. 
Don’t forget to check out how the All of Us Research Program is growing by visiting our Data Snapshots, where you’ll find summary statistics about the cohort’s size and demographics.

Learn more about the Workbench

Questions?
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the Research Hub’s support team at support@researchallofus.org.

Precision Medicine Initiative, PMI, All of Us, the All of Us logo, and “The Future of Health Begins With You” are service marks of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The All of Us platform is for research only and does not provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

Copyright © 2018