The United States has proposed analysing 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. <\/p>\n
At the heart of the \"precision medicine\" initiative, announced todayby 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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
\"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.\" <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
Longer term, he said, the project would provide information on how to individualize treatment for a range of diseases. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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\nUS launches precision medicine research project<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"