National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Journey Bus Bringing Exhibit to Miller School and Lennar Center
The University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and The Lennar Foundation Medical Center will host the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Journey bus — a traveling, hands-on exhibit that raises awareness about the All of Us Research Program. As part of its national tour, the bus will be on the medical campus in front of the Lois Pope LIFE Center on September 13, and at the Lennar Foundation Medical Center on UM’s Coral Gables campus on September 14, both days from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The All of Us Journey bus will visit UM campuses.
All of Us aims to speed up health research and medical breakthroughs through NIH’s Precision Medicine Initiative. The goal of precision medicine is to find ways to make health care more tailored to each person based on their individual differences. All of Us is asking 1 million or more volunteers to share different types of health and lifestyle information. Some participants will be asked to provide blood and urine samples and to give physical measurements, such as height and weight.
For its expertise in genetics and genomics, and its location in one of the most ethnically diverse counties in the nation, the Miller School is the project’s lead partner in the SouthEast Enrollment Center (SEEC). Over the next five years, the Miller School’s All of Us team hopes to enroll participants across South Florida from UM faculty, staff, students, and patients.
“This study truly advances research in terms of its inclusiveness for all ethnicities and ways of life,” said Olveen Carrasquillo, M.D., professor of public health sciences, chief of the Miller School’s Division of General Internal Medicine and one of three principal investigators who leads the SEEC’s participant engagement.
The program is open to everyone, both healthy and sick, from all communities. Unlike a single research study focused on a specific disease or community, All of Us will create a research resource to inform thousands of studies covering a wide range of health conditions. This information could help researchers learn more about different diseases and treatments and improve health for generations to come.
“The genetic diversity of the All of Us data will make a big difference for unlocking the genetic underpinning of common and rare diseases to a much fuller extent,” said Stephan Züchner, M.D., Ph.D., the SEEC’s lead principal investigator, who chairs UM’s Dr. John T. Macdonald Foundation Department of Human Genetics and co-directs the John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics.
“All of Us is an unprecedented project launched in the U.S. that addresses the core of health disparities. The principles garnered from All of Us may establish standards of medical care in the coming decades,” said SEEC co-investigator Margaret Pericak-Vance, Ph.D., a global leader in the genetics of common diseases, who is the Dr. John T. Macdonald Foundation Professor of Human Genetics, director of the Hussman Institute, and executive vice chair of the Department of Human Genetics. “Those who participate in this important program are helping us take a step towards achieving truly personalized medicine, and that will lead to better health care for all.”
To learn more about the All of Us Research Program, please visit JoinAllofUs.org.