New software analyzes human genomes faster than other available technologies

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Investigators at Nationwide Children's Hospital have developed an analysis "pipeline" that slashes the time it takes to search a person's genome for disease-causing variations from weeks to hours. An article describing the ultra-fast, highly scalable software was published in the latest issue of Genome Biology.

"It took around 13 years and $3 billion to sequence the first human genome," says Peter White, PhD, principal investigator and director of the Biomedical Genomics Core at Nationwide Children's and the study's senior author. "Now, even the smallest research groups can complete genomic sequencing in a matter of days. However, once you've generated all that data, that's the point where many groups hit a wall. After a genome is sequenced, scientists are left with billions of data points to analyze before any truly useful information can be gleaned for use in research and clinical settings."

To overcome the challenges of analyzing that large amount of data, Dr. White and his team developed a computational pipeline called "Churchill." By using novel computational techniques, Churchill allows efficient analysis of a whole genome sample in as little as 90 minutes.

"Churchill fully automates the analytical process required to take raw sequence data through a series of complex and computationally intensive processes, ultimately producing a list of genetic variants ready for clinical interpretation and tertiary analysis," Dr. White explains. "Each step in the process was optimized to significantly reduce analysis time, without sacrificing data integrity, resulting in an analysis method that is 100 percent reproducible."

The output of Churchill was validated using National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) benchmarks. In comparison with other computational pipelines, Churchill was shown to have the highest sensitivity at 99.7 percent; highest accuracy at 99.99 percent and the highest overall diagnostic effectiveness at 99.66 percent.

"At Nationwide Children's we have a strategic goal to introduce genomic medicine into multiple domains of pediatric research and healthcare. Rapid diagnosis of monogenic disease can be critical in newborns, so our initial focus was to create an analysis pipeline that was extremely fast, but didn't sacrifice clinical diagnostic standards of reproducibility and accuracy" says Dr. White. "Having achieved that, we discovered that a secondary benefit of Churchill was that it could be adapted for population scale genomic analysis."

By examining the computational resource use during the data analysis process, Dr. White's team was able to demonstrate that Churchill was both highly efficient (>90 percent resource utilization) and scaled very effectively across many servers. Alternative approaches limit analysis to a single server and have resource utilization as low as 30 percent. This efficiency and capability to scale enables population-scale genomic analysis to be performed.

To demonstrate Churchill's capability to perform population scale analysis, Dr. White and his team received an award from Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Education Research Grants program that enabled them to successfully analyze phase 1 of the raw data generated by the 1000 Genomes Project -- an international collaboration to produce an extensive public catalog of human genetic variation, representing multiple populations from around the globe. Using cloud-computing resources from AWS, Churchill was able to complete analysis of 1,088 whole genome samples in seven days and identified millions of new genetics variants.

"Given that several population-scale genomic studies are underway, we believe that Churchill may be an optimal approach to tackle the data analysis challenges these studies are presenting," says Dr. White.

The Churchill algorithm was licensed to Columbus-based GenomeNext LLC, which has built upon the Churchill technology to develop a secure and automated software-as-a-service platform that enables users to simply upload raw whole-genome, exome or targeted panel sequence data to the GenomeNext system and run an analysis that not only identifies genetic variants but also generates fully annotated datasets enabling filtering and identification of pathogenic variants. The company provides genomic data analysis solutions that simplify the process of data management and automate analysis of large scale genomic studies. The system was also developed with the research and clinical market in mind, offering a standardized pipeline that is well suited to settings where customers have to meet regulatory requirements.

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New software analyzes human genomes faster than other available technologies

Provider Finder for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Oklahoma PPO members – Video

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Provider Finder for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Oklahoma PPO members
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Oklahoma wants PPO members to get the most from their health care benefits. Provider Finder, offers online help for shopping and comparing who and where you...

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Provider Finder for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Oklahoma PPO members - Video

Tracking Your Genes: Obama Proposes DNA Biobank of 1 Million Americans – Video

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Tracking Your Genes: Obama Proposes DNA Biobank of 1 Million Americans
http://www.undergroundworldnews.com A new $215 million US government proposal would seek more than 1 million American volunteers for analysis of their genetic information in an initiative...

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Tracking Your Genes: Obama Proposes DNA Biobank of 1 Million Americans - Video

Obama Wants Funding For Research On More Precise Health Care

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Harvard University student Elana Simon introduces President Obama before he spoke at the White House Friday about an initiative to encourage research into more precise medicine. Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

Harvard University student Elana Simon introduces President Obama before he spoke at the White House Friday about an initiative to encourage research into more precise medicine.

You may soon be able to donate your personal data to science. There are plans afoot to find 1 million Americans to volunteer for a new Precision Medicine Initiative that would anonymously link medical records, genetic readouts, details about an individual's gut bacteria, lifestyle information and maybe even data from your Fitbit.

The idea is that medical science can learn a lot more about diseases if researchers can tap into a wide spectrum of information about people who get sick and those who stay healthy.

Medicine has been moving haltingly in that direction. For example, some cancer patients get a genetic test to help doctors identify the best drug to treat their particular subset of tumor. A National Academy of Sciences report in 2011 suggested that there's vastly more potential here for understanding and treating disease. And that idea has taken hold.

Today President Obama asked Congress to fund a $215 million initiative, which would build around those million volunteers. Participants would be assured privacy, and they'd also have a say in how the overall effort is designed.

"Ultimately this has the possibility of not only helping us find new cures, but it also helps us create a genuine health care system as opposed to just a disease-care system," Obama said at a White House ceremony Friday. "Part of what we want to do is to allow each of us to have sufficient information about our particular quirks, that we can make better life decisions. And that ultimately is one of the most promising aspects about this. "

Don't expect this to happen overnight. When this idea was a gleam in the National Academy of Science committee's eye, the scientists said this idea would take decades to mature.

There are already efforts afoot to bring together medical data to advance research. The i2b2 center at Partners HealthCare System in Boston is one federally funded effort to integrate medical records and genetic information on a large scale. Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, Calif., also collaborates with University of California, San Francisco in a similar effort.

And the nation of Iceland (with one-thousandth the population of the United States) has centralized medical information for its citizens, which has proven to be a treasure trove for scientists who want to link genes and disease at least in this largely homogeneous population. A company headquartered in Iceland, deCODE genetics, has tapped into the nation's health data, and that of half a million people from around the world, to draw links between genes and disease. (deCODE is a subsidiary of biotech giant Amgen.)

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Obama Wants Funding For Research On More Precise Health Care

Wonkblog: The biggest challenge facing the governments new plan for better health care

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The Obama administration earlier this week announced a not-so radical idea: Medicare, the massive health-care program for seniors, should do a much better job of paying doctors and hospitals for quality, not quantity, when it comes to care. Instead of paying a flat fee for each service, the administration said by 2018 it wants half of Medicare payments to hospitals and care providers to be calculated based on whether patients see better results.

Because Medicare is such a huge part of overallhealth care spending, the hope is that these changes will trickle outto doctors offices and hospitals across the country, reshapinghoweveryone gets treated. And many of these same efforts are already under way in the private sector.

On its face, it sounds reasonable enough. Who doesn't want to cut waste in America's $2.9 trillion health-care system and improve the kind of care that patients get?

But actually determining the quality of this care is tough business.

The financial stakes are high for the health-care industry and patients. For example, hospitals can face as much as a 2 percent pay cut from Medicare this year if they have especially high rates of patients returning within 30 days being discharged. The tricky thing there is that higher readmission rates dont necessarily indicate a hospital isnt as good there are other factors to consider, including where the hospital's located and the mix of patients.

The number of ways that quality is measured is vast. By one count, 33 different care programs within Medicare used a combined 1,676 reporting measures last year, and about half of those measures were unique to just one program. Another 2013 study of 23 commercial health plans found 546 distinct quality measures, with very little overlap with reporting requirements in federal programs.

There's one group at the center of all this trying to make better sense of how to define quality, and how to give doctors, hospitals and other health-care providers the right financial incentives to pursue a more rational health-care systems. It's known as the National Quality Forum, a Washington-based nonprofit pulling together a wide range of stakeholders to reach greater consensus on how to get the best value from the country's health-care dollars.

For the last four years, the NQF has convened expert panels to make recommendations on how to measure quality across 20 Medicare initiatives that reward providers for delivering better care. This includes programs like the billions of dollars toward the adoption of electronic health records, programs rewarding hospitals for patient satisfaction, new incentives for providers to group together to deliver care on a budget, and more.

The group, under contract with the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, released 2015 recommendations Friday after receiving 1,100 comments on more than 200 possible reporting measures, which include wide-ranging items from how often patients fall, nurse staffing levels, and whether patients receive follow-up care. The vast majority of these quality-based Medicare payment programs are just a few years old, so everyones still tinkering with the formula based on the best available evidence.

This year's recommendations reflect that there needs to be "a much deeper bench" of quality metrics amid the greater shift toward care emphasizing quality, said NQF president and chief executive Christine Cassel. "You can't do value-based purchasing unless you define value," she said. There's also a major effort to better understand how patients respond to the treatments they receive and to better align the varying quality measures across the federal programs, as well as with the private sector.

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Wonkblog: The biggest challenge facing the governments new plan for better health care

Universal health care: the affordable dream

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Universal health care is often presented as an idealistic goal that remains out of reach for all but the richest nations. Thats not the case, writes Amartya Sen. Look at what has been achieved in Rwanda, Thailand and Bangladesh.

An under-funded and overcrowded general hospital in Malaysia

Twenty-five hundred years ago, the young Gautama Buddha left his princely home, in the foothills of the Himalayas, in a state of agitation and agony. What was he so distressed about?

We learn from his biography that he was moved in particular by seeing the penalties of ill health by the sight of mortality (a dead body being taken to cremation), morbidity (a person severely afflicted by illness), and disability (a person reduced and ravaged by unaided old age). Health has been a primary concern of human beings throughout history. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that healthcare for all universal healthcare (UHC) has been a highly appealing social objective in most countries in the world, even in those that have not got very far in actually providing it.

The usual reason given for not attempting to provide universal healthcare in a country is poverty. The United States, which can certainly afford to provide healthcare at quite a high level for all Americans, is exceptional in terms of the popularity of the view that any kind of public establishment of universal healthcare must somehow involve unacceptable intrusions into private life. There is considerable political complexity in the resistance to UHC in the US, often led by medical business and fed by ideologues who want the government to be out of our lives, and also in the systematic cultivation of a deep suspicion of any kind of national health service, as is standard in Europe (socialised medicine is now a term of horror in the US).

One of the oddities in the contemporary world is our astonishing failure to make adequate use of policy lessons that can be drawn from the diversity of experiences that the heterogeneous world already provides. There is much evidence of the big contributions that UHC can make in advancing the lives of people, and also (and this is very important) in enhancing economic and social opportunities including facilitating the possibility of sustained economic growth (as has been firmly demonstrated in the experience of south-east Asian countries, such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and, more recently, China).

Further, a number of poor countries have shown, through their pioneering public policies, that basic healthcare for all can be provided at a remarkably good level at very low cost if the society, including the political and intellectual leadership, can get its act together. There are many examples of such success across the world. None of these individual examples are flawless and each country can learn from the experiences of others. Nevertheless, the lessons that can be derived from these pioneering departures provide a solid basis for the presumption that, in general, the provision of universal healthcare is an achievable goal even in the poorer countries. An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions, my book written jointly with Jean Drze, discusses how the countrys predominantly messy healthcare system can be vastly improved by learning lessons from high-performing nations abroad, and also from the contrasting performances of different states within India that have pursued different health policies.

***

Over the last three decades various studies have investigated the experiences of countries where effective healthcare is provided at low cost to the bulk of the population. The places that first received detailed attention included China, Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, Cuba and the Indian state of Kerala. Since then examples of successful UHC or something close to that have expanded, and have been critically scrutinised by health experts and empirical economists. Good results of universal care without bankrupting the economy in fact quite the opposite can be seen in the experience of many other countries. This includes the remarkable achievements of Thailand, which has had for the last decade and a half a powerful political commitment to providing inexpensive, reliable healthcare for all.

Thailands experience in universal healthcare is exemplary, both in advancing health achievements across the board and in reducing inequalities between classes and regions. Prior to the introduction of UHC in 2001, there was reasonably good insurance coverage for about a quarter of the population. This privileged group included well-placed government servants, who qualified for a civil service medical benefit scheme, and employees in the privately owned organised sector, which had a mandatory social security scheme from 1990 onwards, and received some government subsidy. In the 1990s some further schemes of government subsidy did emerge, however they proved woefully inadequate. The bulk of the population had to continue to rely largely on out-of-pocket payments for medical care. However, in 2001 the government introduced a 30 baht universal coverage programme that, for the first time, covered all the population, with a guarantee that a patient would not have to pay more than 30 baht (about 60p) per visit for medical care (there is exemption for all charges for the poorer sections about a quarter of the population).

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Universal health care: the affordable dream

3,000 home and community care workers on strike across Ontario

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Nearly 3,000 home and community health-care workers hit the chilly picket lines across Ontario Friday as CEOs, managers and administrators stepped up to the front lines.

Community Care Access Centre (CCAC) workers voted to strike on Thursday evening after negotiations between the Ontario Nurses Association (ONA) and the CCACs broke down over wages. All but one of the CCAC catchment areas with representation by ONA voted to strike.

Im really, really pleased with the 3,000 of them that are out there on the line today, said ONA president Linda Haslam-Stroud, who was out picketing with union members in Newmarket. Theyre resolved to ensuring that this employer steps up to the plate.

The striking CCAC workers include registered practical nurses, rapid response registered nurses, care co-ordinators and direct care nurse practitioners. Their roles include helping patients transition from a hospital to home care, working with students to provide mental health supports, connecting patients with ongoing home care and creating support plans for recovering patients.

Haslam-Stroud describes the health care workers as the cog in the wheel for health care.

Haslam-Stroud said CCAC workers cared for her elderly parents for the past seven years, helping them live at home despite her mothers severe dementia. Without them, her mother would have been forced to live in a long-term care facility, she said.

She couldnt toilet herself. She could not dress herself, she said. It was only because of these care co-ordinators (that they could live at home).

The strike news meant hundreds of thousands of who rely on CCAC services each year woke up to uncertainty about their care.

Today is a challenging day for the CCAC team, OACCAC spokesperson Megan Allen-Lamb told the Star.

The impact of Fridays strike on patient care varied across the province, she said, adding contingency plans were in the works for months.

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3,000 home and community care workers on strike across Ontario

Home health care workers on strike across Ontario

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Almost 3,000 health care workers went on strike Friday morning at nine Community Care Access Centres across Ontario, after rejecting a contract offer Thursday night.

The strike hit nine of the provinces 14 centres, all of which have workers represented by the Ontario Nurses Association: Central, Central East, Erie St. Clair, North East, North Simcoe Muskoka, North West, South East, South West and Waterloo Wellington.

Employees at the Hamilton Niagara Haldimand Brant centre voted in favour of accepting the offer.

In the GTA, the strike will affect centres in North York, York Region including Vaughan, Richmond Hill, Markham and Newmarket Scarborough and northern and western Durham region, including Pickering and Ajax.

The strike does not affect the Champlain, Central West, Mississauga Halton and Toronto Central centres, where employees are not represented by the ONA.

During the strike, the centres will be open to patients, families and the general public, according to a statement released Friday. The centres will continue to work closely with hospital partners to ensure patients are able to transition home from hospital safely.

Service providers contracted through the centres will continue to provide home care and services such as personal support, physiotherapy, occupational therapy and social work, among others, in keeping with patients care plans, said Megan Allen-Lamb, CEO of the North Simcoe Muskoka centre.

New patients referred to centres affected by the strike will be triaged so those with the greatest need and most complex cases will get prioritized, said Allen-Lamb.

We have staff that are not represented by ONA. We have redeployed them to different positions within the CCAC, ensuring that we are able to take calls from our patients throughout the labour disruptions and handle any patient calls that come in through the CCAC, she said.

Patients will continue to receive care in homes, schools and clinics without interruption, while those waiting for a room in a long-term care home will be contacted as soon as one becomes available.

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Home health care workers on strike across Ontario

Mayo genetic data bank could boost Obama’s new ‘precision …

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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 ...

What Is Personalized Medicine And Why Is Obama Supporting It With A $215 Million Pledge?

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The Obama administration is proposing to create a large database of patient information, including genetic profiles and medical histories, to further research into precision medicine, which aims to create customized treatments based on a patients genetic makeup and lifestyle choices.

Precision, or personalized, medicine works much the same way that an eyeglass prescription or a blood transfusion is prescribed, based on a patient's exam results or blood type, and proponents believe this line of thinking may be extended to many more areas of medicine.

Jo Handelsman, associate director for science at the White House Office of Science and Technology, has called the $215 million budget allocation for the Precision Medicine Initiative in Obamas proposed 2016 budget a move away from the one-size-fits-all approach to medicine.

Obama's proposal grants $130 million to the National Institutes of Health to launch a national long-term study that will collect biological samples, genetic profiles and electronic health records from at least a million Americans.

Researchers may use an app to track the calorie consumption or environmental health impacts of participants through their smartphones and the database could include everything from their laboratory test results to MRI scans. Patient data will be anonymized and participation is strictly voluntary, the administration says. The system is meant to serve as a reservoir of information that researchers can tap while investigating the nuances of a particular disease in individual patients, or trying to identify genetic trends across treatment groups.

The administration, with its messy record of privacy violations committed in the name of national security, will also grant $5 million to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to build a data system that it says will protect the identities of patients whose information is included in the database. The National Institutes of Health will also host a forum in mid-February to discuss the challenges of creating a national research group to populate the database. Much of the patient information may be pulled from existing studies, according to scientists familiar with the project who spoke on background to Science magazine.

Obama gave researchers a glimpse into his zeal for precision medicine during the 2015 State of the Union address, but he clarified the details Friday.I want the country that eliminated polio and mapped the human genome to lead a new era of medicine -- one that delivers the right treatment at the right time, he said in his address.

The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation has long taken this approach to develop customized drugs for small groups of patients who share the same genetic mutation for the disease. The organization worked with Vertex Pharmaceuticals to create a drug called Kalydeco, which treats a mutation present in only4 percent of patients with cystic fibrosis according to a 2012 study in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. This focus on tailor-made medicine has nearly doubled the median life span of patients from 20 years to 40 years.

This research will dramatically advance our knowledge of diseases, how they originated and how we may prevent or treat them, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told the Washington Post.

Looking ahead, the administration is anxious to try to apply the same principles that have worked for cystic fibrosis to cancer. Obamas proposal requests $70 million for the National Cancer Institute to study the genetic underpinnings of several types of the disease, reports the New York Times.

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What Is Personalized Medicine And Why Is Obama Supporting It With A $215 Million Pledge?

Barack Obama eyes gene therapy growth

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President Obamas $215 million plan to expand research for cancer treatments to fit each individuals genetic makeup could mark a major shift in modern medicine, according to local geneticists.

I think there may be a tipping point soon when people realize genomic medicine is valuable, and this may be part of it, said George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. This seems to be part of a grass-roots groundswell that will lead to everyone wanting to have access to their genomic data.

The effort, which Obama called the precision medicine initiative, would study the genes of about a million volunteers to figure out how to personalize treatments for patients instead of using the same approach for each condition.

Doctors have always recognized that every patient is unique, and doctors have always tried to tailor their treatments as best they can to individuals, Obama said yesterday at the White House as he announced the initiative. You can match a blood transfusion to a blood type. That was an important discovery. What if matching a cancer cure to our genetic code was just as easy, just as standard?

The initiative will be in the budget Obama sends to Congress on Monday.

The president said the effort would provide the National Cancer Institute funds to identify genetic factors that cause cancer to help develop sophisticated new treatments. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration would also receive money to evaluate next-generation genetic tests.

Dr. Robert Green, a medical geneticist and physician-scientist at Brigham and Womens Hospital and Harvard Medical School, said the effort is something that the field has yearned for for many years.

Itll be a wonderful accelerator of progress, he said.

He added that while there is some skepticism about whether the field is solid enough now to invest in, this is exactly what is needed to take us to the point where we can start proving the worth of genomic medicine.

Local biotech executives, including from Vertex Pharmaceuticals and Foundation Medicine, were at the White House event.

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Barack Obama eyes gene therapy growth

US launches precision medicine research project

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The United States has proposed analysing genetic information from more than one million volunteers as part of a new initiative to understand human disease.

The proposal also includesdeveloping medicines targeted to an individual's genetic make-up.

At the heart of the "precision medicine" initiative, announcedby President Barack Obama, is the creation of a pool of people - healthy and ill, men and women, old and young - who would be studied to learn how genetic variants affect health and disease.

Officials hope genetic data from several hundred thousand participants in ongoing genetic studies would be used and other volunteers recruited to reach the onemillion total.

"Precision medicine gives us one of the greatest opportunities for new medical breakthroughs we've ever seen," Mr Obama said, promising that it would "lay a foundation for a new era of life-saving discoveries."

The near-term goal is to create more and better treatments for cancer, DrFrancis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), told reporters on a conference call on Thursday.

Longer term, he said, the project would provide information on how to individualise treatment for a range of diseases.

The initial focus on cancer, he said, reflects the lethality of the disease and the significant advances against cancer that precision medicine has already made, though more work is needed.

The president proposed $215 million in his 2016 budget for the initiative.

Of that, $130 million would go to the NIH to fund the research cohort and $70 million to NIH's National Cancer Institute to intensify efforts to identify molecular drivers of cancer and apply that knowledge to drug development.

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US launches precision medicine research project

US want to analyse DNA of 1m people

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Friday, January 30 17:16:45

The United States has proposed analyzing genetic information from more than 1 million American volunteers as part of a new initiative to understand human disease and develop medicines targeted to an individual's genetic make-up.

At the heart of the "precision medicine" initiative, announced on Friday by President Barack Obama, is the creation of a pool of people - healthy and ill, men and women, old and young - who would be studied to learn how genetic variants affect health and disease.

Officials hope genetic data from several hundred thousand participants in ongoing genetic studies would be used and other volunteers recruited to reach the 1 million total.

"Precision medicine gives us one of the greatest opportunities for new medical breakthroughs we've ever seen," Obama said, promising that it would "lay a foundation for a new era of life-saving discoveries."

The near-term goal is to create more and better treatments for cancer, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), told reporters on a conference call on Thursday. Longer term, he said, the project would provide information on how to individualize treatment for a range of diseases.

The initial focus on cancer, he said, reflects the lethality of the disease and the significant advances against cancer that precision medicine has already made, though more work is needed.

The president proposed $215 million in his 2016 budget for the initiative. Of that, $130 million would go to the NIH to fund the research cohort and $70 million to NIH's National Cancer Institute to intensify efforts to identify molecular drivers of cancer and apply that knowledge to drug development.

A further $10 million would go to the Food and Drug Administration to develop databases on which to build an appropriate regulatory structure; $5 million would go to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to develop privacy standards and ensure the secure exchange of data.

The effort may raise alarm bells for privacy rights advocates who have questioned the government's ability to guarantee that DNA information is kept anonymous.

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US want to analyse DNA of 1m people