Dr. Francis Collins discusses All of Us on CBS This Morning

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Dr. Francis Collins appeared on CBS This Morning to promote the All of Us program, a part of the Precision Medicine Initiative, which launches this Sunday, May 6th. When asked about what it hopes to accomplish, he explained:“Do you ever feel when somebody is making recommendations to you about how to stay healthy or when you need a prescription and you’re wondering 'is this the right drug for me at the right dose?' A lot of what we do in medicine is one-size-fits-all. Precision medicine is this opportunity to make things much more individualized and more precise and more likely to result in a good outcome, but to get to that point we need to collect a lot of data on a lot of people…”All of Us hopes to recruit 1 million Americans, and is particularly interested in recruiting subjects from communities that are typically underrepresented in biomedical research. Dr. Collins addressed questions about privacy concerns by explaining that all data will be de-identified, researchers pledged to not re-identify subjects and that data will be protected from use by law enforcement as a result of new legislation. You can find more information about pharmacogenomics (PGx) such as PGx-guided dosing/prescribing guidelines at CPIC and PharmGKB where you can also find curated information about drugs and genes, from the literature as well as from drug labels and other sources.