President Obama Unveils Details of the Precision Medicine Initiative

President Obama has requested that congress authorize $215 million dollars to fund the newly announced Precision Medicine Initiative. In addition to focusing on the development of cancer treatments tailored to individual cancers the initiative proposes to develop a research consortium to do a longitudinal cohort study of one million people. Patient data could include electronic medical records, health, genomic, pharmaceutical and lifestyle information. The cohort would leverage data from existing longitudinal cohort studies, such as the Framingham Heart Study, as well as from new volunteers. These data would be integrated and available to researchers in secure databases to advance precision medicine discoveries. The proposed funding will be partitioned between the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, the Food and Drug Administration and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. If approved, the funding would go into effect for the 2016 fiscal year. Read more:The Precision Medicine Initiative Fact Sheet from the WhitehousePrecision Medicine Initiative News from Science