The National Institutes of Health is launching a Nutrition for Precision Health program that will recruit a diverse pool of 10,000 participants who are part of the NIH’s All of Us Research Program to inform more personalized nutrition recommendations. In a Jan. 20 interview, Holly Nicastro, Ph.D., M.P.H., a coordinator of Nutrition for Precision Health (NPH), described the scope of the research project.
The NIH is awarding $170 million over five years to clinics and centers across the country for a new study that will develop algorithms to predict individual responses to food and dietary routines.
The study will establish an NPH consortium that will include six clinical centers, a dietary assessment center, a metabolomics and clinical assays center, a microbiome and metagenomics center, a multimodal data modeling and bioinformatics center, a research coordinating center, and additional support for the infrastructure of All of Us. (The research coordinating center is a collaboration between Research Triangle Institute and Cornell University.)
Nicastro spoke about how the All of Us infrastructure is a good match for precision nutritional research. “By leveraging All of Us, we have access to the genomics on their participants and their electronic health record data and we can add in great information. We'll collect microbiome and do metabolomics. We'll do a lot of subjective measures and collect rich information on their diet. The diversity of the All of Us participant population, as well as the existing data and infrastructure really makes this the ideal partnership.”
She added that the field of nutrigenomics has made a few breakthroughs as far as single-gene nutrient interactions, and researchers are starting to learn more about genetic signatures. “But to get to truly precision and personalized recommendations, we need to broaden those considerations beyond specific genes and take into account many more potential exposures and biological predictors.”
A second module of the study will include controlled feeding by giving participants all the food they eat for about two weeks. Module Three is going to take it a step further to a domiciled study, Nicastro said. Participants will check into the study center and they'll remain on site for two weeks to allow for really rigorous data collection and observation of dietary intake.
The six funded clinical centers around the country will enroll the participants. “They'll be able to look into their participant population and do some targeted outreach,” Nicastro said, “and we'll have the opportunity to enroll new participants who might not have heard of All of Us yet.
In year one, the research group is forming and they are developing their full protocol, and getting all of the approvals in place. In fiscal year 2023, they will begin to enroll participants, and development of the algorithms will happen over the next four years.
A press release from NIH mentions that the study is going to help develop algorithms to predict individual responses to food and dietary routines. Some examples of responses researchers could study would be blood glucose responses after a test meal, blood lipid changes, or blood pressure.
“We hope to identify what those most important predictors are,” Nicastro said. “We have evidence from the literature, for example, that the microbiome is a really strong predictor of how individuals will respond to the exact same foods.”
A potential Phase two of NPH would consist in part of validation of the algorithms through targeted clinical trials.
Last year, NIH released a strategic plan for 2020 to 2030 for nutrition research. This is the first large initiative to help realize the goals outlined, Nicastro explained. “In this plan, precision nutrition was identified as the unifying theme, so seeing the investment and the excitement and the commitment from NIH for this large nutrition program — and then seeing the enthusiasm and the excitement of our awardees and all the people who came out to apply for this program and provide feedback and help support this program has been amazing,” she added. “This has been a long time coming. The field is ready, and the scientists are energized.”
