Obama unveils details on precision medicine initiative

U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday unveiled details about a bold new medical research effort known as Precision Medicine Initiative, calling for a 215 million- U.S.-dollar investment in the 2016 budget proposal he will send to Congress next week.

The initiative, which Obama first mentioned publicly during his State of the union   address on Jan. 20, "brings America closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes, and gives all of us access, potentially, to the personalized information that we need to keep ourselves and our families healthier," he said.

Obama noted that doctors have always tried to tailor personalized treatments for patients, such as matching a blood transfusion to a blood type.

"What if matching a cancer cure to our genetic code was just as easy, just as standard?" he asked at an event on precision medicine at the White House. "What if figuring out the right dose of medicine was as simple as taking our temperature?"

"That's the promise of precision medicine -- delivering the right treatments, at the right time, every time to the right person," Obama said.

Most existing medical treatments are just a "one-size-fits-all- approach" and have been designed for the "average patient." As a result, such treatments can be very successful for some patients but not for others, according to a background statement from the White House.

The new initiative, however, "gives clinicians tools to better understand the complex mechanisms underlying a patient's health, disease, or condition, and to better predict which treatments will be most effective," the statement said.

It stressed that advances in precision medicine have already led to "a transformation in the way we can treat diseases such as cancer." For example, patients with breast, lung, and colorectal cancers, as well as melanomas and leukemias are now routinely undergoing molecular testing as part of patient care, and their doctors are choosing treatments based on this information.

The funding Obama wanted for the initiative would include 130 million dollars for the National Institutes of Health to create a voluntary national research group of a million or more volunteers.

This project will "leverage existing research and clinical networks and build on innovative research models" and participants will need to provide their medical records, genetic information, metabolites and microorganisms in and on the body, as well as environmental and lifestyle data, the White House said.

The NIH's National Cancer Institute would receive 70 million dollars to scale up efforts to identify genomic drivers in cancer and apply that knowledge in the development of more effective approaches to cancer treatment.

A total of 10 million dollars would go to the Food and Drug Administration to develop new approaches for evaluating next- generation genetic tests.

Another 5 million dollars would go to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to support the development of standards and requirements that address privacy and enable secure exchange of data across systems.

"So the Precision Medicine Initiative we're launching today will lay the foundation for a new generation of lifesaving discoveries," Obama said, adding that there's bipartisan support for the research plan.

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