The United States is planning to analyze the genetic information of over 1 million individuals in a bid to understand human diseases and in order to develop drugs that are targeted to the genetic make-up of an individual.
President Barack Obama is set to ask Congress on Friday to approve a $215 million budget for the "Precision Medicine Initiative" which seeks to help doctors come up with treatments that are suited for the individual characteristics of their patients.
The initiative will involve the creation of a pool of different individuals who will be studied in order for researchers to learn how genetic variants influence health and diseases.
National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins said that the near term goal of the project is the creation of better treatments for cancer explaining that this is partly due to its lethality and partly because precision medicine, which involves combining medical records as well as genetic and molecular data for big groups of individuals into a single knowledge network that can be used to understand diseases and tailor treatments, has already made significant advances in cancer although more work is still needed.
"Precision medicine is an emerging approach to promoting health and treating disease that takes into account individual differences in people's genes, environments, and lifestyles, making it possible to design highly effective, targeted treatments for cancer and other diseases," wrote Jo Handelsman, Associate Director for Science at the White House Office of Science and Technology. "In short, precision medicine gives clinicians new tools, knowledge, and therapies to select which treatments will work best for which patients."
Of the $215 million the president asked as the 2016 budget of the project, $130 million would go to the NIH as funding for the research cohort. The NIH's National Cancer Institute, on the other hand, will receive $70 million to boost efforts to identify the molecular drivers of cancer and apply this knowledge on the development of drugs.
The remaining $15 million will go to the development of databases and privacy standards that would ensure the exchange of data is secured. Privacy rights advocates have already questioned the ability of the government to keep DNA information in the past and raised fears for the participants becoming identifiable and potentially face discrimination.
The national cohort will be pooled from new volunteers as well as from existing cohorts that already link genomic data and medical outcomes.
