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So I will get friends and other people emailing to me
saying, you know like,
"Why are you doing this All of Us Research Program? "
"Why are you spending tax payer dollars to go do this program?"
"What's it about?"
And I think those are great questions.
And I kind of answer it in three ways:
Kind of from a patient perspective,
a provider perspective
and a researcher perspective.
And if we start just with what All of Us experience as patients,
the vast majority of us do not have access
to precision medicine based cures
because this field is in its infancy.
Great progress in some places like cancer
but the vast majority of conditions don’t have
a path to figure out what can I possibly take
as this individual who’s unique?
And that means we're all still treated as
the average of the people who happen
to have been studied with your particular condition.
And we're kind of in this one-size-fits-all medicine.
And that means especially if you have a complex illness,
a lot of trial and error, right.
Side effects from this drug.
"No that didn't work. Let’s try this one."
"Let’s try this one."
And everything in the care system is well intentioned
but man suffering through
that expensive and painful trial and error is
not a great way to live as a country.
Now let’s think about the providers, right.
Not a great way to live for them either.
They've got more and more pressure
to see more patients per day.
Half the time they don’t even have
the like complete medical history of that patient
that's right in front of them saying,
"Please help me."
And then, they don’t have that much science and evidence
behind a lot of the conditions that they're expert in
to be able to know exactly
how do I deliver care to right now to this patient?
And on top of that they've then got the challenge of
at the same time there's huge amounts of
new scientific discovery that are coming in literally every day.
They’d have to sit around reading all the time
and never lay hands on a patient
to keep up with the latest scientific literature.
And then the third piece of this is the researchers.
We have observed biomedical researchers
at the cutting edge of precision medicine
sometimes getting three, four, five year grants and awards
but they'll spend 40 to sometimes 70 or 80% of that time
on building up the IT infrastructure,
the computing and the data and how do I secure the data?
And they'll spend even more time trying to recruit people
to participate in that study.
85% of clinical trials have to stop early
because they can’t recruit enough people to be part of that.
So that's an enormous cost and drain.
And as soon as you get your award done,
you know you give it a little bit of science on that award
and all of a sudden you gotta start over with the next one,
start again.
Here we go.
We gotta build up the cohort.
We gotta build the technology.
We gotta build the research protocol.
This public resource of the All of Us Research Program
says get to the research faster.
We're going to hand you one of the largest cohorts in the world
that will be the most diverse.
You don't have to go recruit anybody.
We're going to hand you a bunch of data
that's already being cleaned and curated
and made it easy for the researchers to use that
and we're going to hand you the computing and technology
and infrastructure that you don't have to spend your time on.
Get to the science faster.
And if those researchers get to the science faster,
then those providers will have more options to offer
to that patient standing in front of them saying,
"Help me, cure me."
And we as patients will have more options,
less trial and error
and more specificity to get it right
the first time when we walk in saying,
"Help me, cure me."