RTI to lead coordinating center for new NIH initiative to personalize dietary guidance to improve health

TraCS Partner News

Nutrition for Precision Health, powered by the All of Us Research Program, aims to develop algorithms that predict individual responses to food and dietary patterns.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C.— A partnership between RTI International, a nonprofit research institute, and Cornell University's Division of Nutritional Sciences has been selected to serve as the Research Coordinating Center for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Fund's Nutrition for Precision Health, powered by the All of Us Research Program (NPH) consortium. The new program will harness recent innovations in biomedical research—such as artificial intelligence and microbiome research—to study individual biological responses to foods and dietary routines, then develop predictive algorithms for use in clinical settings.

"Despite the importance of a balanced, nourishing diet, there is no one-size-fits-all approach —more precise and dynamic nutritional recommendations are needed to improve health for individuals, and this has been impossible to achieve with the current standard food guidance," said Marie Gantz, PhD, a senior research statistician at RTI. "This work will give us unprecedented insight into the interplay between nutrition and health."

NPH will draw from the All of Us Research Program, which is an effort to gather health, environmental, and behavioral data of at least one million people living in the U.S. to improve public health and biomedical knowledge. NPH will utilize recent advances in biomedical research to generate new data to provide insight into personalized nutrition – referred to as precision nutrition, which seeks to move away from "one-size-fits-all" diet recommendations and create customized, actionable diet plans for individuals.

Gantz will lead the new Research Coordinating Center, along with Dr. Saurabh Mehta at Cornell University. The RTI and Cornell team will provide administrative management and general coordination across the NPH consortium, facilitate the development and implementation of dietary intervention and assessment studies across all study partners, and manage and curate all NPH study data prior to its transfer to the larger All of Us Research Program Researcher Workbench to share data with the broad scientific community.

"The NPH study presents an opportunity to leverage precision medicine to learn more about the impact of nutrition on health, and to help providers create healthy, precise, and effective diet plans for their patients," said Gantz. "RTI has supported the All of Us Research Program by building products, strategies, and messaging to support engagement and retention of program participants and stakeholders, and we are committed to continuing that effort through this new Research Coordinating Center."