Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador and founder of Bioquark, interviews Chris Lunt, Chief Technology Officer of the All of Us Research Program run by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Ira Pastor comments:
Precision medicine refers to the tailoring of medical treatments to the individual characteristics of each patient and away from the predominant “one-size-fits-all” approach of the last century, with the ability to classify individuals into sub-populations that differ in their susceptibility to a particular disease, the biology or prognosis of those diseases they may develop and their response to a specific treatment.
Preventive or therapeutic interventions can then be concentrated on those who will benefit, sparing expense and side effects for those who will not.
To make precision medicine a reality, requires extremely large and diverse patient data sets, and the ability to pull actionable information from these data sets
All of Us
The All of Us Research Program (previously known as the Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program) is a research program run by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and created in 2015 during the presidency of Barack Obama with $130 million in initial funding that aims to make advances in tailoring medical care to the individual.
The mission of All of Us is to accelerate health and medical breakthroughs, enabling individualized prevention, treatment and care.
The project aims to collect genetic, lifestyle, environmental, and metabolomic data, from one million volunteers, over the course of their lifespans, to accelerate research and improve health outcomes, including (but not limited to) information about personal lifestyle and environment, electronic health records, bio-samples (blood, urine, etc), genomic data, physical measurements, data gathered by wearable devices (Fitbit) and smart phones, and clinical trial data.
Chris Lunt
Today we have the honor of being joined on ideaXme by Chris Lunt, a veteran technology executive with experience in Silicon Valley and the federal government, and current Chief Technology Officer for the NIH All of Us Research Program.
In his CTO role, Chris leads the efforts to build an engagement and digital data platform intended to enable thousands of studies to be performed on the data, creates partnerships nationwide to develop technologies that securely gather and integrate that data into for broad research use, and develops analytic approaches and visualization methods that allow researchers of many types to explore and understand the All of Us data set.
Chris joins the NIH from GetInsured, where he served as the vice president of government solutions for the past 4 years. There he worked with the federal government, states, and the vendor community to improve health insurance shopping and enrollment systems.
Previously, Chris worked as an HHS entrepreneur. He has also served as the Vice President of engineering at Readyforce, the Chief Executive Officer of Nombray, the founder and Vice President of engineering at WisdomArk, and the senior director of engineering at Friendster.
On this ideaXme episode we will hear from Chris about:
His background; how he became interested in information technology, search engine development, social network development, and ultimately arrived at the leadership of this “mega project” integrating info-tech and healthcare. The general structure of the NIH All of Us Research Program. The data collection process and data use process of the NIH All of Us Research Program. Data privacy process of the NIH All of Us Research Program. The implications for advances in precision medicine learnings to lead towards more “personalized medicine” (i.e. treatments and preventions developed uniquely for each individual). His future visions on “what it means to be human in the coming decades” and transhumanism.
This interview is in American English
Credits: Ira Pastor interview video, text, and audio.
Follow Ira Pastor on Twitter: @IraSamuelPastor
If you liked this interview, be sure to check out our interview with Dr. Todd Haim of the NIH’s National Institute of Aging!
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