Funding Opportunity for the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Nutrition for Precision Health’s (NPH)

This call for proposals seeks research projects that develop and utilize artificial intelligence (AI) and other computer-aided approaches to facilitate precision nutrition. Precision nutrition is an emerging field that aims to provide targeted dietary and nutritional recommendations for individuals with different characteristics and circumstances in order to prevent and treat diseases, and improve overall health and wellbeing. The Oxford Dictionary defines AI as the theory and development of computer systems that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence processes. This article in Medpage Today covered how AI and other computer-aided approaches can transform precision nutrition by elucidating the complex factors and processes between an individual’s genetics, biology, behavior, social context and environment and their short and longer-term nutritional health outcomes. A January 2021 National Institutes of Health (NIH) workshop entitled “Precision Nutrition: Research Gaps and Opportunities” covered how our society is at a key inflection point, with technology, such as wearables and smartphones, allowing for much more information and data to be collected, and the potential for AI to utilize this data and information to inform precision nutrition efforts. For more details on precision nutrition and AI please see the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) session on Challenges and Opportunities for Precision and Personalized Nutrition which covered current research design and methodologies, limitations in design and data, innovative methodologies and technologies at the various scales of precision nutrition (including genetic, physiological, individual, and social-ecological), the challenges of adapting technologies for utilization and policy and regulatory challenges, with perspectives from academia, federal government, and industry.