Obama seeks 215 mln USD for precision medicine

U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday unveiled details about a bold new medical research effort called Precision Medicine Initiative, saying he will ask Congress for a 215 million-U.S.-dollar investment in his 2016 budget blueprint due out next week.

The initiative, which Obama first mentioned publicly during his State of the Union address on Jan. 20, "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 White House said in a statement.

Calling most existing medical treatments a "one-size-fits-all- approach," the statement said such treatments have been designed for the "average patient" and can be very successful for some patients but not for others.

"This is changing with the emergence of precision medicine, an innovative approach to disease prevention and treatment that takes into account individual differences in people's genes, environments, and lifestyles," it said.

Advances in precision medicine have already led to "a transformation in the way we can treat diseases such as cancer," the White House noted.

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 cohort of a million or more volunteers.

This cohort 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 better regulatory tools.

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. Endite