A new NIH database could help shape the future of medicine.The National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program has released the world's largest integrated health database, bringing together genetic information and health records from more than 747,000 people — 86% of which come from those historically underrepresented in biomedical research.“Marketplace Morning Report” host Kimberly Adams spoke with Dr. Heidi Rehm, the chief genomics officer at Massachusetts General Hospital and an institute member at the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard, to discuss what this release means for the future of medicine. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.Kimberly Adams: One of the interesting things about this database is that it combines genomes with medical records, information from wearable devices, environmental exposure, air quality. What is the value of putting all those pieces together?Dr. Heidi Rehm: What we're learning is that there are many factors in our health that interrelate — whether it's your likelihood of a heart attack or your likelihood of getting cancer, if you just study these things one at a time, you don't get the full picture. But by incorporating many different factors — both the data that we generated, the health history, the environmental exposures — all of this information simultaneously, we can get a much more accurate and better picture of how these factors interrelate, and then give more accurate prediction to individuals about their healthcare risks and how we should best care for them, what treatments will be most effective. All of those sorts of information will be improved by having such a rich interconnected data set.Adams: Funding for this program has really taken a massive hit over the years. 72% of the budget has been cut since 2023. What happens if the funding runs out?Rehm: If funding were to completely cease, it is likely that this dataset would no longer be accessible to researchers because of that even baseline amount of funding that's needed to sustain it in its current state. So that would be awful. The investment that has been made would end beyond what's already been learned from the dataset, which is extensive.Adams: With these extensive learnings from the dataset as is, how do you think it's going to impact the future of healthcare?Rehm: It's already impacting healthcare in the sense that information that we've learned from this dataset, and there have been thousands of publications that have already occurred from the dataset, and that information is already being used in the practice of medicine today. It's informing polygenic risk scores that are being given back to patients that relate to their cardiovascular risk or their prostate cancer risk. These are ongoing applications of the data already, and we will continue to see more and more examples of that over time.