Obamas precision medicine initiative could bring …

The White House on Friday unveiled a $215 million program to study genes of a million Americans in various stages of sickness and health, with the hope of gaining vast new insight into diseases and how to cure them.

The Precision Medicine Initiative, which President Barack Obama announced in his State of the Union speech, will bring new funding to federal health and science agencies to build data that flows between medical clinics to labs that sequence the human genome and gather other data. The goal is to find more targeted personalized approaches to treatments and cures sometimes called personalized medicine.

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This helps us find new cures but also helps us create a genuine health care system as opposed to a disease care system. We want each of us to have sufficient information about our particular quirks so that we can make better life decisions, Obama said.

The initiative includes $200 million in new spending for the National Institutes of Health $70 million targeted for the National Cancer Institute and $10 million for the FDA. Another $5 million goes to the federal office in charge of health IT, which will work on making sure the data can be transmitted and shared by different clinical and research centers while protecting patient privacy. The people who allow their DNA to be studied will be volunteers.

Some key Republicans in Congress have signaled support of the precision initiative. House Energy and Commerce Chair Fred Upton (R-Mich.), who this week released draft legislation to reform FDA, said Obamas initiative is a natural fit in the discussion about how to accelerate and improve the discovery, development and delivery of new cures and treatments.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) attended the White House announcement and promised to work closely with Obama and Democrats so that cutting-edge medicine begins reaching patients more quickly, while still preserving this nations gold standard for safety and quality The president has recognized this, Chairman Upton in the House is working on this, and I have spoken with [HHS] Secretary [Sylvia Matthews] Burwell about our plans in the Senate health committee to work in a bipartisan way to modernize the way drugs and medical devices are discovered, developed and reviewed.

The development of the genetic consortium has long been a gleam in the eye of NIH director Francis Collins, who led the sequencing of the first human genome at a cost of about $400 million 15 years ago. Now it costs about $1,000 to sequence one persons genes.

Collins said that the lower costs of DNA sequencing and the availability of electronic health records lets scientists do things we couldnt have imagined a decade ago.

Thats one of the reasons were bold enough to say we can do this, he said of the new initiative.

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Obamas precision medicine initiative could bring ...