A $170 million funding commitment by the NIH is intended to advance research in precision nutrition, ... [+]
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is planning to spend $170 million over the next five years to advance the relatively new field of precision nutrition.
The initiative, entitled The Nutrition for Precision Health powered by the All of Us Research Program (NPH), aims to recruit up to 10,000 participants to take part in a variety of research studies at several universities and academic health centers.
Precision nutrition is a field that analyzes individual characteristics such as genetics, metabolism, gut microbes, lifestyle, and a variety of biological, environmental, and social factors to arrive at personalized - rather than generic - eating and nutritional recommendations.
Understanding how all these factors might interact has been elusive and is therefore a major aim of the new research. Eventually, researchers hope to use predictive analytics to develop algorithms that will predict how individuals respond to food and diets and then enable dietary recommendations that are customized to each individual.
The initiative includes 11 new awards to various universities, and it provides additional funds to three existing NIH All of Us Research Program awards. (The All of Us Research Program aims to collect and study data from one million or more people in the U.S. in order to learn more about health determinants. National enrollment began in 2018 and is expected to last at least 10 years.)
Here is a complete list of the 14 awards, and here are two examples:
A collaboration involving Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Illinois, Chicago and Rush University will make up the Illinois Precision Nutrition Research Consortium, one of six clinical centers funded across the country. It will receive $13,321,184 spread over five years, depending on the availability of funds.
“We will learn more precisely how to match dietary recommendations to the needs of an individual,” said Linda Van Horn, professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and one of the senior principal investigators on the Illinois project.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will receive two NPH awards under the direction of researchers at UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health: a $13 million NPH Clinical Center and a $19 million Metabolomics and Clinical Assay Center.
Elizabeth Mayer-Davis, PhD, the Cary C. Boshamer distinguished professor of nutrition and medicine at the Gillings School and the UNC School of Medicine, is the principal investigator for the clinical center. She said that the UNC would ultimately enroll more than 2,000 participants for the NPH, adding that “about 500 also will participate in what’s called a ‘controlled feeding study,’ with all food and beverages provided for six weeks. That will help us to learn how unique people respond to three different diets.”
UNC’s Susan Sumner will be the principal investigator for the Metabolomics and Clinical Assay Center (MCAC). She and her colleagues will collect clinical assays and metabolomics data, which measure thousands of compounds in a person’s blood, urine, stool, or saliva.
By supporting this large-scale study, NIH is taking the next step in its 2020-2030 Strategic Plan for NIH Nutrition Research. Plans call for the NPH data to eventually be made widely available so that clinicians can improve their treatment of diseases and conditions affected by nutrition.
“The All of Us Research Program was designed to support a wide range of studies by providing the infrastructure for a large, diverse data set that has been previously unavailable,” said Josh Denny, M.D., CEO of All of Us, in the NIH release. “We’re delighted that All of Us has a role in advancing in-depth nutrition research and furthering precision nutrition by serving as a platform for this unique initiative.”
