KU Medical Center welcomed head of NIH’s All of Us Research Program to celebrate launch of the Heartland Consortium

The official launch of the Heartland Consortium’s work as part of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) All of Us Research Program was celebrated today with a visit from the program’s chief executive officer, Josh Denny, M.D., M.S.  The day’s events included educational panels, tours of the new enrollment space and a launch event with community partners and media.

First, Denny appeared live on “Open Mics with Dr. Stites,” the morning show hosted by The University of Kansas Health System. The episode featured the consortium’s lead investigator, Akinlolu Ojo, M.D., Ph.D., executive dean of KU School of Medicine. The program was hosted by Steven W. Stites, M.D., executive vice president of clinical affairs and chief medical officer of The University of Kansas Health System. The program also featured Matthias Salathe, Ph.D., chief research officer of the University of Kansas.

Announced in September 2023, the four-state Heartland Consortium is led by the University of Kansas Medical Center and also includes academic medical centers at the University of Iowa, the University of Missouri and the University of Nebraska. KU Medical Center and its partners will receive nearly $3 million in fiscal year 2025 funding, with the potential to renew for three additional years.

The goal of the All of Us Research Program is to advance precision medicine research, one day enabling clinicians to tailor patient care by accounting for individual differences in biology, behavior and environment. To that end, the program has created a national research resource that will include comprehensive de-identified health information from 1 million or more people in the United States.

“The Heartland Consortium is excited that our region will now be a part of the national All of Us Research Program, helping to further precision medicine research by ensuring people in Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Iowa are represented,” Ojo said. “Our participation was made possible by the substantial resources and researcher expertise from disciplines across the KU schools of Health Professions, Medicine and Nursing and from other consortium members from our four-state region.”

Unlike research studies that focus on one disease or group of people, All of Us is building a diverse and secure database that informs thousands of studies on a variety of health conditions. Researchers can tap into a broad database to better understand the risk factors for certain diseases and inform future treatments and prevention. All of Us follows all federal, state and local laws in keeping data safe. The program removes all personal details from the data to prevent participants from being identified.

The consortium aims to reach out to a wide variety of participants, with special emphasis on those in rural areas, as well as other groups historically underrepresented in research.

“We have to represent the full country as a resource to accelerate medical breakthroughs, discoveries that will be taking into account biology, environments and lifestyles that will be relevant to everyone. And this is what we were embarking on today, as we announce and launch the Heartland Consortium,” said Denny in his remarks at the public launch event, noting that the launch of the Heartland Consortium will help expand the All of Us Research Program into the Midwest. “This is an incredible, powerful resource that impacts real lives.”