Abstract: Arkansas Children’s Research Institute and Arkansas Children’s Nutrition Center are developing a precision health program, encompassing precision nutrition and precision medicine, with the goal of establishing associations between dietary and medical intervention, human metabolome, microbiome, and health outcomes, leveraging past and present research studies of parent and child health at the USDA-funded ACNC and clinical research programs within Arkansas Children’s Hospital and UAMS. The Precision Health program involves data integration from studies investigating the effects on treatment outcomes of various prevention and treatment strategies, utilizing a broad-spectrum of metabolomics techniques, including quantitative metabolomics, untargeted metabolomics, microbiome, genomics and proteomics. Realizing precision health requires considerable research infrastructure development, and involves the integration of analytics, data science and information technology, device, software, diagnostics and testing service development, and translational and educational practices. Drs. Alan Tackett and Colin Kay will overview this precision health program with focus on metabolomics and proteomics resources.

Dr. Tackett obtained a degree in chemistry with distinction from Hendrix College in 1998 and a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from UAMS in 2002. He performed postdoctoral training in cancer epigenetics and proteomics at The Rockefeller University from 2002-2005, when he joined the faculty at UAMS and has risen to the rank of distinguished professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.  He received the Sharlau Family Endowed Chair for Cancer Research in 2016 and was nominated into the Arkansas Research Alliance in 2021. He serves as Deputy Director of the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute at UAMS. Dr. Tackett has built an internationally-recognized research team focused on developing new therapeutic strategies to treat metastatic melanoma. He has published over 150 scientific articles and holds multiple patents in this area; and has received over 30 million dollars of funding from the government to support his research endeavors. He serves as director of two NIH-funded national research centers in Arkansas, a Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE, Phase 2) in systems biology and the IDeA National Resource for Quantitative Proteomics.

Dr. Kay obtained a PhD in Nutritional Biochemistry from the University of Guelph in Ontario Canada in 2004 and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowships at Penn State University and the University of East Anglia (UK). After 8 years at the Norwich Medical School in England as Assistant and Associate Professor, he became Professor at NC State University in 2022 (David H. Murdock Distinguished Professorship).  He joined UAMS in 2023 as Professor of Developmental Nutrition (Dept. of Pediatrics); Director of Precision Health Research, Arkansas Children’s Research Institute; and Scientific Director of the Metabolomics and Analytical Chemistry Research Core, Arkansas Children's Nutrition Center. Dr. Kay’s research is focused on development of qualitative and quantitative metabolomics methodologies for establishing the contribution of dietary phytochemicals to the human metabolome.