President Obama's Precision Medicine Initiative

President Barack Obama announced his plans for the $215 million Precision Medicine Initiative, which aims to compile genetic and physiological data with the hope that patients can one day be optimally treated using targeted therapies. The plan is part of the administration’s FY2016 budget request to Congress.

In describing the new initiative, Obama predicted it could help save lives and create jobs, among other possible benefits. “If we’re born with a particular disease, or a particular genetic makeup that makes us more vulnerable to something, that’s not our destiny, that’s not our fate,” Obama said, according to The New York Times. “We can remake it. That’s who we are as Americans, and that’s the power of scientific discovery.”

To support this plan, Obama is asking for $130 million for the National Institutes of Health to recruit participants for a longitudinal study so researchers can put their genomic, medical, and physiological data into a large database. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration would play a role in the new initiative, too, with $10 million dedicated to building a database to support research and regulation of precision-medicine efforts. Additionally, $70 million would go to the National Cancer Institute to identify genomic markers for cancer that could lead to targeted therapies. Finally, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services would get $5 million to support protocols that would ensure secured and standardized data.

Despite these ambitious funding priorities, some experts say it is not enough to truly support the efforts. “It’s not even close,” Keith Yamamoto, a biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, told Nature. Still, he said, he is optimistic that the initiative will lead to researchers identifying genetic correlations and disease risk factors that could lead to improved treatments.

Read news coverage of the proposed initiative from The New York Times and Nature.