NIH awards $27M to establish new network of genomics-enabled learning health systems

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is awarding $5.4 million in first-year funding to establish a new program that supports the integration of genomics into learning health systems.

Present in many hospitals across the United States, learning health systems are a type of clinical practice that bridges research and patient care. These systems use a variety of methods to continually analyze patient data. Clinicians then use the results of those analyses to refine practices and improve future care.

The new Genomics-enabled Learning Health System (gLHS) Network aims to identify and advance approaches for integrating genomic information into existing learning health systems. As genomic testing becomes increasingly common, more and more genomic data are available in clinical settings, and learning health systems present an opportunity to translate this evidence quickly and directly into improvements in medical care.

We are excited to bring this network together to move genomic discoveries into clinical practice. Learning health systems present an excellent opportunity to generate new medical understandings from genomic data, which is critical to realizing the promise of precision health for everyone.

The network consists of six clinical study sites and a coordinating center, all of which have an operating learning health system. Each clinical site will propose a project that uses patient data to develop and refine some aspect of genomic medicine. These could include implementing testing for hereditary diseases or using genomic information to select which medications a patient is given.

The network also includes a coordinating center, which will select a set of projects that both seem feasible in the program’s five-year duration and have the potential to be shared throughout the network. 

“We are excited to bring this network together to move genomic discoveries into clinical practice,” said Robb Rowley, M.D., a program director in the Division of Genomic Medicine at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of NIH. “Learning health systems present an excellent opportunity to generate new medical understandings from genomic data, which is critical to realizing the promise of precision health for everyone.”

A major aim of the gLHS Network is to create generalizable knowledge and genomic medicine practices so that data collected at each clinical site can improve patient care more broadly. Beyond exchanging information within the network, the coordinating center will orchestrate sharing the network’s tools and resources with the greater clinical and scientific communities.

Such sharing practices have the potential to reach patients outside of hospitals with learning health systems. This includes many under-resourced settings, such as rural hospitals or other clinical settings in low-income areas.

“Currently, the success of learning health systems is typically limited to highly-resourced medical centers,” said Teri Manolio, M.D., Ph.D., director of NHGRI’s Division of Genomic Medicine. “We hope this initiative will provide generalizable tools that enable limited-resource settings to learn from their ongoing experiences to improve their implementation of genomic medicine.”

The awards are jointly funded by NHGRI and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and total $27 million, which will be distributed over the program’s five years, pending the availability of funds.