The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced in a press release that they are starting an initiative aimed at advancing “research on whole-person health” and creating “an integrated knowledge network of healthy physiological function.”
The project will last five years and consist of multiple stages. According to the NIH, it will be an extension of the Human Reference Atlas and the Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP) to create one roadmap. After the initial stages, the program will “link common clinical measures, such as blood pressure, blood glucose and cholesterol, to major physiological functions,” and make the model interactive.
Leader of the initiative, Helene M. Langevin, M.D., director of NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health said in a statement: “By organizing healthy physiological function into a whole-body knowledge network, researchers will be able to explore scientific questions about health in a new way. With our ability to acquire new scientific data at an increasingly dizzying speed, the importance of integrating and connecting new data to what we already know is greater than ever. The Whole Person Reference Physiome will lay a foundation for understanding the factors that drive declines in health and mechanistic pathways to health restoration.”
