New York coalition formed to recruit patients for highly diverse health database

Developing countries have called for more money for biodiversity funding – Copyright AFP Michal Cizek

The Mount Sinai Health System has been awarded $7 million from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create and lead a New York coalition to contribute to the most diverse health databases in history.

The aim is to inform medics about individualized treatment and care for a variety of diseases and health conditions. To achieve this, Mount Sinai will work to increase the number of participants from various demographics, regions, and stages of opioid use disorder to address the public health crisis of rising overdose deaths.

The New York coalition will include academic medical centres and community partners with expertise in engaging, recruiting, and retaining participants often underrepresented in biomedical research in New York City. The city is one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse enclaves in the world.

The New York coalition will try to recruit more than 7,000 new participants across the tri-state area to join the NIH’s All of Us Research Program in the first year. The All of Us Research Program was created in 2015 to reflect the diversity of the U.S. and its territories, with a focus on precision medicine, or development of individualized plans for disease prevention and treatment.

The system is based on multimodal learning. Multimodal models add a layer of complexity to large language models, which are based on transformers built on an encoder-decoder architecture with an attention mechanism to efficiently process data.

According to Principal Investigator Monica Kraft, MD, the Murray M. Rosenberg Professor of Medicine and Chair of the Department of Medicine at Mount Sinai Health System and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai: “Our partnership encompasses dozens of hospitals and medical practices, longstanding collaborations, senior research investigators, and seasoned staff with experience in recruiting diverse populations.”

Kraft adds: “We will work closely with the All of Us consortium and key stakeholders, assess the impact of our activities, identify best practices, and share both our expertise and discoveries along the way. We look forward to continuing to build on our strong and robust IT, data science, clinical, data collection, and electronic health record infrastructures.”

The coalition will seek to enrol 3,300 new participants with opioid use disorder, an epidemic that has affected thousands across the U.S. through increasing opioid use, addiction, and overdose deaths.

The crisis has most recently involved a rise of synthetic opioids like fentanyl, which are significantly more potent and deadly than heroin and prescription opioids.

There are distinct racial disparities among those with opioid use disorder, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): although opioid use is more common among white Americans, Black adults and teens experienced a steeper increase in the rate of fatal opioid overdoses than whites during the last decade.

This grant will enable researchers to harness new technologies and integrate vast amounts of health information to uncover new insights and accelerate the development of personalized treatments.

For example, the investigators will harness insights from trusted networks and communities of ongoing research they currently lead.