UNC-Chapel Hill leads two centers for $170 million NIH precision nutrition study
Because there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to eating, Gillings School of Global Public Health will research more precise nutritional recommendations to improve health and prevent disease
(CHAPEL HILL, N.C.) The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will play a large part in a new National Institutes of Health (NIH) precision nutrition study.
The UNC-Chapel Hill received two of 14 contracts — totaling $170 million over five years — that the NIH Common Fund awarded as part of Nutrition for Precision Health, powered by the All of Us Research Program.
Understanding how people differ in both their metabolism and their bodily response to what they eat and drink is critical to tailoring diets for an individual’s optimal health, and providing personalized intervention strategies for preventing and delaying the onset of chronic and progressive diseases such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia and cancer.
To that end, researchers at the UNC 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 goal of the overall Nutrition for Precision Health Study — powered by the All of Us Research Program — is to develop algorithms that predict individual 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 participant group of the All of Us Research Program. These advances provide unprecedented opportunities to generate new data offering insight into personalized (or precision) nutrition.
“We know that nutrition, just like medicine, isn’t one-size-fits-all,” said Holly Nicastro, a coordinator with the NPH. “[This study] will take into account an individual’s genetics, gut microbes, and other lifestyle, biological, environmental or social factors to help each individual develop eating recommendations that improve overall health.”
Clinical trial delivers fresh look at nutrition
Elizabeth Mayer-Davis, PhD, Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Nutrition and Medicine at the Gillings School, is the principal investigator for the Clinical Center. She also 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. “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. Of the 2,000 NPH participants, we will see about 75% from Chapel Hill, N.C., (urban) area and 25% from the Kannapolis, N.C. area, which is rural. We are excited about this — across our two locations we will be able to better represent the state’s population.”
Susan Sumner is the principal investigator for the Metabolomics and Clinical Assay Center (MCAC). She is a professor in the Department of Nutrition at Gillings and the UNC Nutrition Research Institute where she directs the Metabolomics and Exposome Laboratory.
Under Sumner’s leadership, the MCAC 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 provides a more comprehensive view of an individual’s health and wellness than is achievable with traditional clinical chemistry measurements widely employed today.
“The NPH MCAC will discover biomarkers related to dietary intake and determine their biological relationships to states of health and wellness,” Sumner said. “It also will provide insights into how individuals respond differently to the same dietary intervention — and how that is related to health and wellness. This approach is important to the development of personalized nutritional intervention strategies.”
The NPH awardees will spend 2022 planning before moving into clinical trials. The findings gathered over the full five years of the program will be made publicly available through a free database as part of the NIH’s All of Us research effort.
All of Us and Nutrition for Precision Health, powered by the All of Us Research Program, are service marks of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
