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Early in my career, I traveled around Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, with a research team to draw blood from Mennonite and Amish families who have an increased risk of developing Hirschsprung disease, a genetic condition that impairs the development of the intestinal tract. We would later extract DNA from those blood samples to look for the culprit gene that triggers the disease. One of the most exciting parts of my graduate career was being part of finding one of those genes.

That same core idea — gathering population-level data to find the biological roots of disease — underpins the National Institutes of Health All of Us Research Program, a biobank that launched 10 years ago. Late last month, the project released genetic, health, lifestyle, and other anonymized data from more than 747,000 participants spanning 98 percent of US zip codes, making All of Us the in the world. It’s an important milestone for precision medicine, and as principal investigator of the All of Us Genome Center since 2018, I’m particularly proud of the way our teams at the Ó³»­´«Ã½ and Ó³»­´«Ã½ Clinical Labs helped enable the biobank’s success. Ó³»­´«Ã½ Clinical Labs generated more than 60 percent of the whole genome sequence data in All of Us, as well as 10,000 multi-omic profiles that capture molecular data beyond DNA, like proteins, metabolites and the epigenome creating rich datasets that will enable AI-powered discovery of disease mechanisms, biomarkers, and new treatment strategies.

Biobanks like All of Us are secure data repositories of biological samples such as blood and saliva collected from thousands, even millions, of volunteer participants who have consented to donate these materials for research. Scientists across the country have already been leveraging the unprecedented scope of integrated health and genomic data from All of Us to accelerate discoveries on the drivers of health and disease. For example, data from All of Us has fueled more than and led to significant breakthroughs from Ó³»­´«Ã½ scientists and many other researchers across all 50 states, including a first-of-its-kind genetic test to predict risk of eight cardiovascular conditions, and a low-cost prostate cancer risk model now in a clinical trial with 5,000 US veterans.

There are so many more health benefits to come from collecting and analyzing biobank data, especially when paired with rich phenotypic data.

As costs continue to fall and efficiency continues to improve, we’ve shown that producing massive, high-quality, cost-effective, secure data for a national biobank is achievable and that those insights can be translated to real-world impact. The US has an opportunity to build on the world’s most advanced biomedical research infrastructure by expanding and evolving All of Us into a next-generation national biobank.

By treating a next-generation biobank as a national asset — one that is AI-ready, highly secure, equipped for long-term data integration — we can transform our healthcare system into a dynamic learning system that continuously generates insights to improve disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment for everyone. 

A national biobank can also help us improve how we design and run clinical trials, by enabling researchers to select participants based on specific genetic or biomarker profiles. As a result, trials would require fewer participants, take less time, and cost significantly less. This could drastically accelerate the development of new therapies for rare disease, cancer, and much more.  

As All of Us moves closer to the goal of 1 million participants, and as advances in molecular technologies and AI converge, we can envision a national biobank with 10 million participants that forms the foundation for more advanced biomedical infrastructure and can impact healthcare across the US population — an amazing advance over our very targeted, small-scale research efforts in Pennsylvania nearly three decades ago.

I see a future that builds on All of Us’ investments to sustain a national biobank that accelerates the understanding of chronic disease, enables earlier detection and prevention, makes clinical trials more efficient, and maintains our US global competitiveness in precision medicine. A future, expanded US biobank is one that is deeply integrated with healthcare to allow discovery to scale responsibly over decades. 

Stacey Gabriel is Executive Vice President, Head of Platforms and Scientific Execution at the Ó³»­´«Ã½.

Ó³»­´«Ã½ is an institutional recipient of All of Us funding. Research reported in this post was supported by the All of Us Research Program of the National Institutes of Health under OT2OD038121. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.

All of Us is a registered service mark of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.