WHITE HOUSEU.S. President Barack Obama at the launch of the 2015 Precision Medicine InitiativeWHITE HOUSE
The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the premier institution in the U.S. dedicated to the advancement of medical research, has announced the launch of a number of programs in the field of precision medicine, an approach that combines clinical and molecular information on diseases in an effort to develop individualized treatments. It represents the first step in the Precision Medicine Initiative launched in 2015 by President Barack Obama. The initiative will be allocated approximately US$1 billion over the next four years. The selected projects will present proposals for implementation of one of the initiative’s most ambitious phases: building a large-scale research participant group called a cohort. The purpose of the cohort program is to study the relationship between genetics and health and life-style on the lives of a research cohort of one million volunteers. In an interview with Science, NIH Director Francis Collins remarked on the program’s scale, calling it “the largest, most ambitious research project of this sort ever undertaken.” One of the participating institutions, Vanderbilt University, will examine specific recruiting methods in order to help the program meet its objective of 79,000 volunteers by the end of 2016. By 2019, the number of volunteers is expected to grow to one million. Verily, a Google subsidiary that conducts research into the life sciences, will act as consultant to the program.
Republish