Coalition to Recruit N.Y. Participants for All of Us Research Program
The Mount Sinai Health System has been awarded nearly $7 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create and lead a New York coalition to recruit more than 7,000 new participants across the tri-state area to join the NIH’s All of Us Research Program in the first year.
To date, more than 800,000 people have enrolled in the national All of Us Research Program, which has a goal of gathering data from 1 million or more diverse people, including those who are LGBTQ+ or Indigenous, with the goal of accelerating medical research and health breakthroughs.
Mount Sinai will also work to increase the number of participants from various demographics, regions, and stages of opioid use disorder to address the public health crisis of rising overdose deaths.
The New York coalition will include academic medical centers and community partners with expertise in engaging, recruiting, and retaining participants often underrepresented in biomedical research in New York City—one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse enclaves in the world.
Along with Mount Sinai, the group of collaborators includes Weill Cornell Medicine, New York City Health + Hospitals, the Institute for Family Health, and NYU Langone.
“This multi-institutional effort will fill a gap to significantly increase recruitment of participants in an area of the country with rich diversity,” said Principal Investigator Monica Kraft, M.D., the Murray M. Rosenberg Professor of Medicine and Chair of the Department of Medicine at Mount Sinai Health System and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in a statement. “Our partnership encompasses dozens of hospitals and medical practices, longstanding collaborations, senior research investigators, and seasoned staff with experience in recruiting diverse populations. We will work closely with the All of Us consortium and key stakeholders, assess the impact of our activities, identify best practices, and share both our expertise and discoveries along the way. We look forward to continuing to build on our strong and robust IT, data science, clinical, data collection, and electronic health record infrastructures.”
The coalition will join the other All of Us regional hubs to also enroll 3,300 new participants with opioid use disorder, an epidemic that has affected thousands across the United States through increasing opioid use, addiction, and overdose deaths. The crisis has most recently involved a rise of synthetic opioids like fentanyl, which are significantly more potent and deadly than heroin and prescription opioids. There are distinct racial disparities among those with opioid use disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: although opioid use is more common among white Americans, Black adults and teens experienced a steeper increase in the rate of fatal opioid overdoses than whites during the last decade.
The investigators will harness insights from trusted networks and communities of ongoing research they currently lead, including The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine’s BioMe BioBank program, which supports rapid analysis from electronic medical information; the Mount Sinai Million Health Discoveries Program, which aims to carry out genetic sequencing of 1 million Mount Sinai patients within the next five years; and the NIH Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative, which is examining the long-term effects of COVID-19.
