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President Obama seeks to invest $215 million to improve the nation’s ability to explore and leverage precision medicine. He announced details of his plan at a White House event Jan. 30.
The Precision Medicine Initiative, first unveiled at his State of the Union address, will focus on finding the personalized, genetic factors that can lead to cancer and on developing one of the largest patient data sets in the world to study a host of diseases and conditions. The goal of the initiative is to increase physicians’ ability to take a patient’s individual genetic makeup and molecular subtypes of diseases into account to improve the chances of successful treatment.
Courtesy of whitehouse.gov
President Obama gave details regarding the Precision Medicine Initiative at a White House event Jan. 30.
“Analyzing data from one of the largest research populations ever assembled will teach us more about the connections between us than ever before,” President Obama said during his speech. “This new information will help doctors discover the causes, and one day, the cures, of some of the most deadly diseases that we face.”
The effort will be led by officials at the National Institutes of Health, with the support of other agencies including the Food and Drug Administration and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.
The time is right for this visionary initiative, according to NIH Director Francis S. Collins and National Cancer Institute Director Harold Varmus, who both have key leadership roles.
Oncology is a clear choice for enhancing the near-term impact of precision medicine, they wrote in a perspective published Jan. 30 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“The cancer-focused component of this initiative will be designed to address some of the obstacles that have already been encountered in precision oncology: unexplained drug resistance, genomic heterogeneity of tumors, insufficient means of monitoring responses and tumor reoccurrence and limited knowledge about the use of drug combinations,” according to the editorial (N. Engl. J. Med. 2015 [doi 10.1056/NEJMp1500523]).
“Precision medicine’s more individualized, molecular approach to cancer will enrich and modify, but not replace the successful staples of oncology – prevention, diagnostics, some screening methods, and effective treatments – while providing a strong framework for accelerating the adoption of precision medicine in other spheres,” Dr. Collins and Dr. Varmus wrote.
The initiative’s plan to generate a giant patient data set will enable the next generation of scientists to develop new ways to detect, measure, and analyze a wide range of biomedical information. The research component will be assembled in part from existing NIH-funded studies that have already been collected or are well positioned to collect data from willing participants.
“Many possibilities for future applications spring to mind,” the authors said of new data set. “Today’s blood counts might be replaced by a census of hundreds of distinct types of immune cells; data from mobile devices might provide real-time monitoring of glucose; blood pressure and cardiac rhythm; genotyping might reveal particular genetic variants that confer protection against specific diseases.”
In unveiling the initiative, President Obama asked for support from patient advocates, researchers, hospitals, and privacy experts. A long-term goal of the initiative is to enable patients to securely access and analyze their own health data, he said.
“Ultimately, this has the possibility to not only help us find new cures, but also help us create a genuine health care system as oppose to just a disease care system,” he said. “Part of what we want to do is allow each of us to have sufficient information about our particular quirks so that we can make better life decisions.”
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