The NIH’s All of Us Database Expands into Multiomics

Late last month, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced an expansion of the All of Us database. The United States created the All of Us research program to capture the diversity of the American population by building a comprehensive database to help solve the country’s health challenges through research.

The latest update expands the program’s database, which now includes health data from over 747,000 participants and adds, for the first time, multiomics information such as proteomics and RNA sequencing (RNAseq) data.

“You can't just use other cohorts around the world to understand the unique health challenges that happen in the United States: the difference of exposures, the cultures, the diets, the genetics, and the interplay of all those things,” explained Joshua Denny, the chief executive officer of the All of Us research program.

A Portrait of Health in the United States

The All of Us research program, initially called the Precision Medicine Initiative cohort program, was first announced in 2015. Denny explained that one of the main reasons for the initiative was that the US lacked a unified effort in genomics and precision medicine at the time. This motivated scientists and the NIH administration to start a program to fill that gap.

The program’s main goal was to build a representative database of the people living in the US. To do this, they aimed to enroll at least one million people who would share their health information as well as answer questionnaires and donate biospecimens for genomic and other laboratory assessments. These would be added to a national database that scientists could access to advance research on a wide range of health conditions.

The program opened in 2018, and in 2019, it enrolled more than 175,000 participants and gathered the electronic health record (EHR) data of over 112,000 people.¹

Over the last seven years, the All of Us database has expanded significantly. The latest update brings the number of EHRs close to 482,000 and makes health information from over 747,000 participants available to researchers. These data, in turn, provide an in-depth look at participants’ genomic information, including more than 1.3 billion genetic variants, 553,000 genotyping arrays, and 96,000 structural variant records, according to the NIH press release. Additionally, the new dataset now encompasses 600,000 physical measurements and survey responses from 747,000 participants, providing social, environmental, and behavioral information.

Along with the comprehensive collection of health information, Denny noted the accessibility and ease of use of the database platform as another key feature. “[Researchers] can create as many projects as they want. It takes them 15 minutes to create a new one, and they can get started right after they write it up,” he said. “It's emblematic of what people can do. Somebody who really knows what they're doing can come in and do a project in a day and get results that are on a huge population.”

Entering the Multiomics Era

The newest addition to the All of Us database is the inclusion of omics data. Researchers can now access the proteomic data from approximately 10,000 people and RNAseq data from nearly 9,000 participants. The All of Us team plans to continue adding more multiomics information in the near future.

This will help complete the “molecular picture” of the program, which was centered on genes when it first started, Denny said. “These markers that change more and are more dynamic will complement our understanding of the genome, both to help us understand the genome and also to help tailor someone's therapy and understand their risk profile for screening for disease and early diagnosis,” he added.

Building a health portrait that truly represents the diversity of the US population has been no easy feat, said Denny, emphasizing the efforts of institutions, community partners, and medical centers to engage diverse populations across the country and get the program off the ground.

Denny also noted that the pace of participant enrollment has faced challenges, pointing to the limitations imposed by the pandemic lockdowns and budget cuts to the program. “We would clearly have been over a million participants at this point without those cuts,” he said. “But we have remained committed to our current participants, getting and protecting their data, protecting their privacy, and making sure researchers could get access to the data and do real work to make real discoveries.”

Denny hopes the program will continue to fuel discoveries and return lifesaving results. “We have just so many amazing stories from people who are catching cancers that they wouldn't have otherwise been screened for and then testing family members to find who's at risk,” he said. “About 150,000 [people] have received information about their genetics that would affect how they process drugs, and over 5,000 individuals have received potentially lifesaving results. How many research studies directly have an impact that potentially saves 5,000 lives?”

Correction 7/21/2026: A previous version of this story listed the number of genetic variants included in the All of Us database as 1.3 million. It is actually 1.3 billion. The text has been corrected.