NIH unveils the world’s largest genomics-and-health database

The US government has just handed scientists the largest map of human health ever assembled. It pairs more than half a million genomes with real medical records, and it arrives as the programme behind it faces deep budget cuts.

The database comes from All of Us, a research programme run by the National Institutes of Health. On June 30, 2026, the NIH released data from more than 747,000 participants. That makes All of Us the world’s largest integrated store of genomes and electronic health records. It links 535,000 whole genome sequences to nearly 482,000 medical records. No rival can match that depth and breadth.

The scale is the point. To tailor a treatment to one person, researchers first need patterns drawn from many. All of Us bundles genomes with doctors’ notes, diagnoses, and test results. It adds health surveys, wearable data from devices like Fitbits, and even local air quality. The trove now holds more than 1.3 billion genetic variants. The eventual goal is one million volunteers.

Built for the people usually left out

What sets All of Us apart is who is in it. More than 86 per cent of participants come from groups long overlooked in medical research. That includes racial and ethnic minorities, older adults, women, people with disabilities, and rural residents. Participants span all 50 states.

That matters because the current gold standard does not manage it. The UK Biobank, the field’s leading repository, holds records for about 500,000 people. Almost all are of white European ancestry. Findings from such data often fail to carry over to other groups. All of Us has already helped uncover gene variants that cut the risk of kidney disease in people of African ancestry. A narrower database would miss that kind of result.

“One of the most exciting components is its sheer diversity,” said Alicia Martin. She is a statistical geneticist at the Broad Institute who uses the data to build risk-prediction tools. It offers a way, she said, to understand not just who is at risk of disease, but who will respond to which treatment.

The data layer for AI medicine

This is also raw material for artificial intelligence. Modern drug discovery and diagnosis lean on large, clean datasets. A genomic-plus-clinical trove at this scale is exactly what the new wave of AI research tools and science-specific models are hungry for. Claims that AI can already outperform doctors run well ahead of the evidence, but better data is what would narrow the gap. The release even opens what the programme calls its multiomics era, adding protein and RNA data for thousands of participants.

The payoff is already visible. All of Us data has fed more than 1,400 peer-reviewed papers from some 23,000 researchers. It helped build a genetic test that predicts inherited risk across eight cardiovascular conditions. It backed a low-cost prostate cancer model now in a trial of 5,000 veterans, and early work on catching disease before it starts, including Alzheimer’s. The programme has returned more than 733,000 personalised DNA results to participants. Access is free, so a researcher at a rural university gets the same data as one at a top institute.

A national treasure, and a target

The timing is bittersweet. The milestone arrives just as All of Us loses ground on funding. Its budget has been cut by 72 per cent since 2023. One of its main funding streams, the 21st Century Cures Act, is set to expire at the end of this fiscal year. More than 50 medical organisations have written to Congress warning that much of what has been built could be lost.

NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya called the database “a national treasure” and a foundational platform for investigators at every career stage. Both things are true at once. The resource is more valuable than ever, and its future is less certain than ever. That tension is sharper still while other governments pour money into research and computing infrastructure.

The privacy question underneath

A store of half a million genomes tied to medical records is also one of the most sensitive datasets ever built. All of Us shares it only with registered researchers, through a controlled cloud workbench. It leans on the trust of the people who volunteered. That trust is the quiet foundation of the whole project, and it is worth as much as the genomes themselves. As AI makes it easier to draw conclusions from health data, guarding that trust will only get harder.

For now, the headline is simple. Scientists have never had a health map this large, or this representative of who people actually are. Whether the country keeps paying for it is the next question, and the answer will decide how much of the promise turns real.