Kelly Gebo earned a doctorate in medicine from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a master’s in public health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
In September 2018, the All of Us Research Program at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that Dr. Gebo had joined as the program’s new Chief Medical and Scientific Officer.
As chief medical and scientific officer, Dr. Gebo works with health care professionals and researchers, participants, and national and community-based organizations to lead the program’s scientific agenda, with a special focus on populations that have been historically underrepresented in research.
All of Us has been described as a historic effort to gather data from more than a million people living in the United States to accelerate research and improve health.
All of Us is building a research resource with data and samples shared by participants for use in thousands of studies, spanning different aspects of health and disease.
Recently, the All of Us Research Program announced that it plans to test blood samples from 10,000 or more participants.
The program will use a test approved for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration.
While the program has halted in-person biosample collection, participants can still sign up at JoinAllofUs.org.
Participants can also answer survey questions online, agreeing to share electronic health records.
The program says it removes personal identifiers from information and stores it in a central platform, with safeguards in place to protect participant privacy.
Over the course of the program, participants will receive information back about themselves and about studies that use All of Us data.
“Collectively, these efforts are an important step toward helping researchers learn more about COVID-19 and its impact on different communities across the United States,” said Dr. Gebo in the statement. “We are grateful to our participants for so generously sharing their information, which will allow us to support research on COVID-19 and other diseases.”
According to the NIH, All of Us will start with blood samples from March 2020 and work backward. The tests will help researchers assess varying rates of coronavirus exposure among All of Us participants.
“With our nearly 350,000 participant partners across the country, All of Us will enable the research community to answer some of today’s most critical questions and inform future preparedness efforts,” said Josh Denny, M.D., All of Us’s chief executive officer.
Antibody testing, which uses blood samples, is different than the nasal swab tests health care providers commonly use to detect active infection.
Antibody tests are generally done with people who do not currently have symptoms, to find out if they had the virus in the past.
Positive samples will potentially undergo further testing to determine if the positive finding is due to the new coronavirus specifically and to assess the level of the immune system’s response.
In addition to antibody testing, All of Us has deployed a 20- to 30-minute survey for participants who have been ill with COVID-19 and those who have not, and includes questions on COVID-19 symptoms, stress, social distancing and economic impacts.
Participants are invited to take the survey each month until the pandemic ends, so researchers can study the effects of COVID-19 over time and better understand how and why COVID-19 affects people differently.
All of Us is rapidly collecting information from more than 200,000 participants, who have shared their electronic health records with the program so far, offering a rich data set for analysis. T
The program is working to standardize electronic health record (EHR) information to help researchers look for patterns and learn more about COVID-19 symptoms and associated health problems, as well as the effects of different medicines and treatments.
“For many, the importance of research has never been more clear,” said Denny. “Our participants share a common hope and sense of purpose--to improve the health of their communities and future generations. None of this work would be possible without them.”
Study collaborators include the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, supported by the National Cancer Institute; the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and Quest Diagnostics.
