Even with Funding Slashed, NIH’s All of Us Program Enables Progress in Research

Despite substantial funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health’s ambitious All of Us research program, scientists are already gleaning new insights from its data — and some people have even seen benefits to their own healthcare, regardless of whether they participate in the study.

This was always the point of All of Us: to boost health and quality of life for Americans and for people around the world. As a participant myself, it’s wonderful to see that the program is living up to its potential despite repeated cuts to its funding.

All of Us — initially known as the Precision Medicine Initiative — was first created in 2015 with the goal of collecting long-term health, genome, and other data from as many as 1 million participants. It was intended as a counterpoint to the earliest large-scale genome programs, which were primarily launched by northern European nations and led to a wealth of genomic insights about white people, with little representation of other populations. From its start, All of Us was designed to represent the diversity of the U.S. so any research findings based on this program would be as broadly applicable as possible.

When national enrollment opened in 2018, then-NIH director Francis Collins said, “The All of Us Research Program is an opportunity for individuals from all walks of life to be represented in research and pioneer the next era of medicine.”

Last week, scientists, participants, and the general public were invited to a day of presentations and panel discussions that amounted to a helpful update about how All of Us is doing. These provided nice context on top of some key data points that were already publicly available. For instance, as of early 2025, nearly 850,000 participants had been enrolled from across the U.S., and their data was being used in more than 15,000 research studies. On the funding front, All of Us saw its budget reduced by a third in fiscal year 2024; since then things have only gotten worse. As a result, the program had to throttle back enrollment initiatives and slash funding for to its academic medical center partners.

But last week’s presentations were all about the good news — what can come from All of Us even when conditions aren’t ideal. In one talk, student Cole Bird from the University of Kansas School of Medicine described a study intended to determine whether a surgical procedure used to help people with chronic rhinosinusitis, a common inflammatory condition, actually makes a difference in how well people sleep after the procedure. (As you can imagine, self-reported sleep habits aren’t always accurate.) By tapping into the wearable data uploaded by All of Us participants, researchers were able to compare sleep patterns in people before and after surgery, matched to healthy controls. Results indicated that while people might not sleep longer after surgery, the quality of their sleep improved considerably. This kind of information is useful for other physicians who may be wondering whether to recommend this surgery to their own patients.

In a separate study presented by John Xiang, a research assistant at Stanford University, scientists aimed to improve methods for detecting glaucoma early, before it becomes too advanced to avoid complications. By using electronic medical record data from All of Us, they trained a model to catch the earliest signs of glaucoma based solely on clinical indicators, rather than from the advanced ophthalmological testing to which many patients don’t have access. The model was validated in a different group of patients at Stanford and is a promising step forward in early detection of this condition.

I also really enjoyed hearing from All of Us participants who shared their own stories about how the program had shaped their views of science and what they’d gotten from it so far. Adriana Mares, who joined the program in 2018 and has since gotten her own grant funding to study All of Us data, said that being part of the program had changed her view of how science and healthcare connect. “I realized how valuable participation is in shaping [science],” she said. “It doesn’t just happen in a benchwork lab; it happens in our own communities.” Daniel Garza said that participating in All of Us gave him a glimpse of a family medical history that he’d missed out on as the child of immigrants. “It was information that I’d never had, information that I could relay to my doctors,” he said.

There’s still plenty of room in All of Us before the program reaches its goal of 1 million participants. Interested in enrolling? Get the details here.

Short Takes

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