WASHINGTON The Mayo Clinics cutting-edge pooling of patients genetic and medical data could soon become the model for an ambitious national databank envisioned by the Obama administration.

President Obama announced plans for the databank Friday as part of the $215 million precision medicine initiative that he will ask Congress to fund in the 2016 budget. The initiative includes gathering details from a million volunteers nationwide to help tailor genetic diagnoses and treatments of diseases.

If we have a big data set, a big pool of people thats varied, then that allows us to really map out not only the genome of one person, but now we can start seeing connections and patterns and correlations that helps us refine exactly what it is that were trying to do with respect to treatment, the president said at a White House ceremony, attended by Mayo Vice President Dr. Gianrico Farrugia.

Farrugia was invited to the White House because Mayo set up a successful biobank system at its Center for Individualized Medicine in 2009. The data repository reached its goal of assembling the genetic and medical details of 50,000 individuals for purposes of comparison with the idea that the knowledge would be distributed as widely as possible, said Farrugia.

Its transformational, he said. Anyone who uses the information [in the Mayo biobank] and generates new information [by doing so] is obligated to put that new information in the bank.

Farrugia said Mayo will await details of the new federal program and present them to a Mayo community advisory board and scientists in deciding whether to contribute to the national databank. But the aims of the administration appear to merge nicely with what Mayo has been doing for five years.

If we combine all these emerging technologies, if we focus them and make sure that the connections are made, then the possibility of discovering new cures, the possibility of applying medicines more efficiently and more effectively can improve individual health care, Obama said.

The White House had no direct conversations with Mayo as it prepared the precision medicine initiative, Farrugia said. However, the Rochester-based medical center did talk to several federal agencies.

Mayo has pioneered computerized analysis of shared data as a path to individual treatment. It recently entered into an agreement with health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group to create what is reportedly the largest health care database.

Now, Farrugia said, Mayo is committed to the presidents initiative, which also includes specific efforts to find gene-based cures for cancer.

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Mayo genetic data bank could boost Obama's new 'precision ...