Is This Company the Big Winner in Obama's Push for Precision Medicine?

Source: Illumina Inc.

President Obama has released more details about his plans to fund a precision medicine initiative that the administration hopes will mean that doctors can deliver the right medicine to the right patient at the right dose at the right time .

The plan to advance personalized medicine includes $215 million in funding that could accelerate demand for Illumina 's gene sequencing solutions.

First, a bit of background The idea of using genetics to create new medicines and determine which patients would respond best to them isn't new. Cancer treatment has been at the forefront of this research for years, both in innovating patient screening and revolutionizing drug development.

For example, the University of California San Diego Moores Cancer Center runs the Center for Personalized Cancer Therapy.

That center runs genetic tests on tumors in a bid to match up patients with the most effective cancer treatments, including both FDA-approved medicines such as Bristol-Myers Squibb 's Opdivo and drugs that are currently in clinical trials, such as BioMarin Pharmaceutical 's BMN-673.

At the center's Institute for Genomic Medicine, or IGM, a lot of that genetic research is being conducted with the help of Illumina's gene sequencing machines. According to the IGM, the Illumina HiSeq 2000, Illumina HiSeq 2500, Illumina MiSeq, and Illumina HiScan System are all used at the facility.

At the tipping point According to the MD Anderson Cancer Center's Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan Institute for Personalized Cancer Therapy, we are converging on a "perfect storm" in personalized cancer treatment that could be"offering the opportunity to make a bold leap forward in personalizing cancer care."

One of the driving forces of this opportunity is the significant advances in speed and cost that have been made over the past decade in sequencing genes.

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Is This Company the Big Winner in Obama's Push for Precision Medicine?