UNC Researchers To Lead NIH Precision Nutrition Centers

 The University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill will play an important role in the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) new study on precision nutrition.

UNC received two of 14 awards from the NIH Common Fund as part of the Nutrition for Precision Health study (NPH) — which falls within the wide-ranging All of Us Research Program — that will total $170 million over five years.

Understanding how people differ in both their metabolism and how their body responds to what they eat and drink is important to tailoring diets that optimize an individual’s health.

With precision nutrition, medical professionals can provide personalized intervention strategies to prevent and delay the onset of chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia, and cancer.

Researchers at UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health will direct both a $13 million NPH Clinical Center (one of six across the United States) and a $19 million Metabolomics and Clinical Assay Center.

The overall goal of the study is to develop algorithms that use predictive analytics to determine an individual’s responses to food and dietary patterns. The program will build on recent advances in biomedical science, including artificial intelligence, microbiome research, and the infrastructure and diverse participation groups of the All of Us Research Program.

These advances could provide opportunities to generate new data and offer insights into personalized nutrition.

Elizabeth Mayer-Davis, PhD, the Cary C. Boshamer distinguished professor of nutrition and medicine at the Gillings School and the UNC School of Medicine, is the principal investigator for the clinical center. Additionally, she serves as chair of the Gillings Department of Nutrition and directs UNC’s Nutrition Obesity Research Center.

“Our center will first establish an opportunity for enrollment in the All of Us Research Program, and then we will enroll more than 2,000 participants for the NPH,” Mayer-Davis said in a press release.

“About 500 also will participate in what’s called a ‘controlled feeding study,’ with all food and beverages provided for six weeks. That will help us to learn how unique people respond to three different diets.”

Working alongside Mayer-Davis, Susan Sumner, PhD, is the principal investigator for the Metabolomics and Clinical Assay Center (MCAC). She is a professor in the Gillings School’s Department of Nutrition and at the UNC Nutrition Research Institute, where she directs the Metabolomics and Exposome Laboratory.

Sumner and other MCAC researchers will provide certified clinical assays and acquire and process high-quality metabolomics data, which measures tens of thousands of compounds in biospecimens, such as blood, urine, stool, or saliva.

Metabolomics data provides a more comprehensive view of an individual’s health and wellness than traditional clinical chemistry measurements.

Those who received NPH awards will spend 2022 planning before moving into clinical trials. The findings gathered over the full five years of the study will be made publicly available to researchers registered through a free database as part of NIH’s All of Us research effort.