1M PMI: The launch event of the most ambitious study of human health in history?

The University of Pittsburgh (PA, USA) launches the 1 million Precision Medicine Initiative (1M PMI) at the PittMed + AI: Transforming Human Health Symposium.

On May 1st, 2025, I was one of hundreds of attendees of something called the “PittMed + AI: Transforming Human Health Symposium”. Sounds ambitious, right? It is. And wait until you hear the title of the very first aim of the day, “the launch of the 1 million precision medicine initiative – 1M PMI.”  Yes, I typed that correctly. The aim of this multi-institutional, multi-national joint academic and industry venture is to perform comprehensive multi-omics of over 1 million people in a longitudinal context. Let the scale of that sink in for a second, particularly if you’re blown away by the scale of recent work, such as the 50,000 proteomic samples you can dig through from the UK Biobank (Stockport, UK).

As we often discuss with guests on The Proteomics Show podcast, the term “multi-omics” means a lot of different things to different people. In genomics papers, it can mean genomics and transcriptomics on the same tissues. Mass spectrometrists like my co-host Dr Neely and I commonly do metabolomics and proteomics on the same tissues or single cells and then look for some mutations or protein post-translational modifications and call it a multi-omics study. But what does the 1M PMI project consider multi-omics? It starts with genomics, transcriptomics, epigenetics, proteomics, metabolomics, lipidomics and integration of the corresponding clinical assays from the same patient samples taken on the same day. Is that all the -omics? It’s about all I can name off the top of my head.

A staggering number of world-renowned scientists and thought leaders were packed into the agenda. The plenary talk by Dr Leroy Hood, who has had his hands in every paradigm shift in biology in my lifetime, was a particular treat. Other multi-omics pioneers such as Dr Anil Mardinoglu, Dr Hasan Turkez and Dr Minho Shong detailed their team’s efforts in P4 initiatives — those that combine predictive, preventative, personalized and participatory healthcare with multi-omics analysis in an attempt to improve human health. Dr Nathan Price of the Buck Institute (CA, USA) detailed how these same principles can be leveraged to improve the human healthspan, or critically the amount of time that people actually enjoy being alive.

Around these jetlagged speakers, Pitt research was also on prominent display. Dr Chandan Sen showed how his team leverages spatial multi-omics to develop actionable therapies to combat slow-healing wounds and Dr Fritz Roth demonstrated how his group tackles the intimidating complexity of human missense variants, one protein or gene at a time.

The day kicked off with a formal signing of the collaboration papers between our dean of the Pitt School of Medicine, Dr Anantha Shekhar, with the leadership of the artificial intelligence (AI) company Vizzhy, Inc. (Bengaluru, India). If you were asking how one could possibly integrate all of those -omics datasets, I hope that answered your question. AI was one of the main topics of the day, with talks both external and internal, including Pitt’s own Associate Dean of AI in Medicine, Dr Hooman Rashidi, who delivered one of the most impressive and interactive demonstrations of the power of AI that I’ve ever personally seen. AI was a focus of a talk from Craig Mundie, who you probably associate with leading a small West-Coast company, Microsoft  — who has spent his retirement on the cutting edge of AI infrastructure and applications. Of specific regional interest was a talk by the surprisingly approachable Sunil Gupta of Yotta Infrastructures, a global leader in data center construction and management. On that subject, Mr Gupta described what will be necessary to fully integrate the data from this collaboration in the form of a 150 megawatt dedicated data center to be built right here in Pittsburgh. He projected an approximate investment of over one billion dollars over 5 years to complete this new center.

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Look, we hear a lot about AI these days. I won’t lie here and say I’m an expert, but modern proteomics can’t happen without it. If you don’t believe me, I encourage you to check out our most recent recorded webinar “AI in Proteomics” on the website of the US Human Proteomics Organization (TX, USA). While I’m sitting here writing this, I’m logged into three separate servers that are using a combination of deep learning and neural networks and scalable cloud computing to attempt to make sense of just 800 human proteomic samples recently acquired in my lab. Simply scaling this same study to over one million samples is both beyond my group and any one lab’s capabilities today. Now imagine that this was just one of the complex datasets in each sample. How many experts in epigenetics can even point out the correct instruments used to perform lipidomics? Or the reverse?

An initiative of this scale is clearly beyond any lab and quite possibly beyond the capabilities of any one institution. To pull off the 1M PMI project, it will take a large, multi-institutional and multi-national team. Where will the skilled labor force come from to collect and analyze these samples? I think that’s where my new home – The University of Pittsburgh – really comes in with our dreams and goals to train the scientists and workforce of the future. I’m excited to be here on the ground floor for this and I hope that you’re as excited as I am to see what comes next.

Disclaimer: the opinions expressed are solely those of the authors and do not express the views or opinions of their employers, Bioanalysis Zone or Taylor & Francis Group.

About the author

Benjamin C. Orsburn
Assistant Professor
University of Pittsburgh

Ben is an established expert in translational mass spectrometry, most recently as an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and prior to this as a Principal Investigator at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (MD, USA). His research is centered on applying high-throughput and single-cell proteomics/multi-omics as tools to understand heterogeneity in drug response and adaptation. He is best known for his attempts to make proteomics accessible to a wide audience through the News In Proteomics Research blog and the US Human Proteomics Organization-sponsored podcast, THE Proteomics show. Ben is also the winner of the 2023 BOSCA Award.