Abstract Precision medicine research (PMR) holds potential to transform health by unearthing genetic and non-genetic mechanisms of disease and developing tailored prevention and treatment. Participation of adults with intellectual disability in PMR offers new opportunities to address their substantial health disparities. Yet efforts to identify their unique needs for inclusion and engagement in PMR have been lacking. Despite evidence that most adults with intellectual disability demonstrate consent capacity, precision medicine (PM) researchers may exclude them, fail to accommodate their unique needs in decision-making, or use proxy consent with little meaningful assent. Consent of adults with intellectual disability to PMR further raises novel concerns, including best models for consent and how to manage the return of genetic results while also assuring genomic privacy and promoting inclusion and empowerment—believed to be critical for successful PMR. Unfortunately, many PM researchers feel ill-equipped to respond; they express desire for educational and practical resources that are not currently available. These gaps contribute to adults with intellectual disability being understudied and create barriers to generating knowledge to address their health needs. They also impede empowerment and are increasingly ethically questionable: adults with intellectual disability want to be included in PMR. The proposed study employs an academic-community partnership to close these gaps by: (1) conducting a national, disability-tailored survey with adults with intellectual disability to identify preferences regarding decision-making role, communication of results, genomic privacy, and needs for engagement in PMR; (2) Creating a PMR study-adaptable consent toolkit to support PM researchers in including adults with intellectual disability in PMR and empirically test it via a text complexity study and cognitive interviews with adults with intellectual disability to ensure understandability to this population; and (3) Conducting a social validity study with PM researchers to assess the toolkit’s usability, relevance, acceptability, and comprehensiveness. The web-based consent to PMR toolkit will be freely available. We will disseminate our findings through workshops, webinars, peer-reviewed publications, and presentations at professional meetings. PMR has stirred hopes for a new, scientifically-based, and empowering healthcare model that reaches, and can benefit, those who are most vulnerable and experience substantial health disparities. This project has the potential to transform PMR by helping PM researchers avoid the pitfalls of bias, uphold principles of human agency valued by community members, deploy strategies to further grow and diversify existing PMR datasets. This work will, over time, help foster practices in PMR that promote equitable healthcare—NIH priorities. This research is the first-time multiple stakeholders including adults with intellectual disability will collaborate to use empirical ethics inquiry to address consent and other challenges in PMR and will yield critical theoretical and practical insights to PMR inclusive of adults with intellectual disability.

Narrative Adults with intellectual disability experience significant health disparities. Although they may benefit from precision medicine research advances, they are underrepresented in research and understanding of the legal, ethical, and social consent challenges that present barriers to their inclusion in this research is limited. A stakeholder-engaged approach to studying key issues for engagement of this population in precision medicine research and designing a disability accessible, interactive, and protocol-tailored consent toolkit will respond to: (1) expressed needs of precision medicine researchers for practical tools; (2) scientific interest in engaging adults with intellectual disability in precision medicine research; and (3) the goal of promoting health equity through inclusive precision medicine research.