Mount Sinai Health System Receives $7M NIH Grant to Boost Diversity in Research
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Mount Sinai Health System has received nearly $7 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create a New York coalition to recruit over 7,000 new participants to join the NIH’s All of Us Research Program. The program seeks to gather data from 1 million diverse people to accelerate medical research and health breakthroughs. Besides Mount Sinai, other collaborators in the coalition include Weill Cornell Medicine, New York City Health + Hospitals, the Institute for Family Health, and NYU Langone.
Mount Sinai Health System Receives $7M NIH Grant to Boost Recruitment for All of Us Research Program
The Mount Sinai Health System is the recent recipient of a near $7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The funding is geared towards establishing a New York coalition aimed at enlisting over 7,000 new participants in the All of Us Research Program within the first year.
Since its inception, the All of Us Research Program has already welcomed over 800,000 enrollees. The initiative’s overarching objective is to collect data from a minimum of 1 million diverse individuals. This includes those who identify as LGBTQ+ or Indigenous, in a bid to expedite advancements in medical research and health breakthroughs.
Mount Sinai will also focus on enhancing the participant pool from different demographics, geographical locations, and stages of opioid use disorder. This is to address the public health emergency of escalating overdose deaths. The coalition is set to feature academic medical centers and community partners proficient in engaging and retaining participants, often underrepresented in New York City biomedical research.
Coalition Partners Include Prominent NYC Medical Institutions
Collaborators in this venture will include Weill Cornell Medicine, New York City Health + Hospitals, the Institute for Family Health, and NYU Langone. Monica Kraft, M.D., the coalition’s Principal Investigator, stressed the importance of this multi-institutional effort in increasing participant recruitment in a region known for its diversity.
The coalition will work with the All of Us consortium and other key stakeholders to enrol over 3,300 new participants with opioid use disorder, an issue that has affected thousands through rising opioid use, addiction, and fatal overdoses. Distinct racial disparities exist, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noting a steeper increase in the rate of fatal opioid overdoses among Black adults and teens than whites in the past decade.
Harnessing Insights from Ongoing Research Initiatives
The investigators will draw upon insights from ongoing research efforts they currently lead. These include The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine’s BioMe BioBank program for rapid e-medical information analysis, the Mount Sinai Million Health Discoveries Program targeting the genetic sequencing of 1 million Mount Sinai patients within five years, and the NIH Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative that studies the long-term effects of COVID-19.
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