Elizabeth Burnside Promotes NIH’s All of Us Research Program

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) All of Us Research Program is working to build the most diverse dataset in existence to advance precision medicine research. Precision medicine – which takes individual factors like environment, lifestyle, family health history, and even genetics into account – might lead to reduced health care costs and improved patient outcomes.

The All of Us database will help unlock the full potential of precision medicine. Researchers investigating the efficacy of new “personalized” treatments often spend time and resources on creating new databases for each study, which may focus on a single condition or group of people.

By collecting health data of 1 million or more participants, the All of Us database will be a powerful tool for future research on a wide variety of health conditions. Elizabeth Burnside, MD is a coprincipal investigator of All of Us at UW–Madison. Her passion for their project isn’t just academic: It’s personal.

“I was a second-year medical student, and my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer,” Dr. Burnside shared in an All of Us video. Even then, personalized treatment was on her mind. “I thought, ‘Maybe they can do it better if they consider the individual characteristics of my mom.’”

In her current research projects, Dr. Burnside works to optimize –and individualize – screening and treatment protocols for breast cancer. Her partnership with All of Us is the latest step on her journey to improve population-based screening and diagnosis of breast cancer.

“My dream is that we can really personalize prevention, screening, and treatment,” said Dr. Burnside. “Helping mothers, sisters, families avoid a disease that really just takes too much, every year.”

UW–Madison, with UW Health, has been engaged in the program’s recruitment and enrollment in Madison and Milwaukee since 2017. All of Us has already made impressive progress, with more than 639,000 participants registered. More than 80% of the participants belong to groups that are underrepresented in biomedical research. Past research programs gathered only about 5% of their data from these groups, making All of Us the most diverse database of its kind.

This print ad ran in People magazine and Time magazine on May 15 and May 22, respectively.