Obama's $215 million Precision Medicine Initiative launched

A new Precision Medicine Initiative will revolutionize personalized medicine in the USA, helped by voluntary data sharing by more than one million Americans.

On Friday, US President Barack Obama gave more details about the scheme which he announced during his State of the Union speech last month. The $215 million program is part of the President’s budget for 2016. This includes $130 million going to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), $70 million to the National Cancer Institute, $10 million to the US Food and Drug Administration and $5 million to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

The NIH said that precision medicine is an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person. While significant advances in precision medicine have been made for select cancers, the practice is not currently in use for most diseases. The new initiative aims to revolutionize medicine and generate the scientific evidence needed to move the concept of precision medicine into everyday clinical practice.