In his State of the Union address in January 2015, President Obama made reference to a “precision medicine initiative.” Following this somewhat oblique reference, Obama has released more details of the plan, including a proposed budget of $215 million.
At a White House event announcing the program, the President said that precision medicine “gives us one of the greatest opportunities for new medical breakthroughs that we have ever seen.” He went on to add: “The time is ripe to unleash a new wave of advances in this area, in precision medicine, just like we did with genetics 25 years ago.”
“Precision medicine” is more commonly referred to as personalized medicine among the healthcare community. Personalized medicine proposes the customization of healthcare. This means medical decisions, practices, and drug products being tailored to the individual patient. So rather than condition x needing drug y, diagnostic testing would be used to select the appropriate therapy for an individual person based on that person’s unique genetic make-up and physical characteristics.
Advances in genomics have helped make personalized medicine a clinical reality, and several patients have benefitted from the tailor-made approach.
With the funding, Obama proposes that $215 million go to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC).
Of that total, $130 million would go to NIH for developing a large-scale research project to collect health data on 1 million participants. The National Cancer Institute would get $70 million to fund research into the genomic drivers of cancer, while $10 million would go to the FDA for database and regulatory infrastructure development, and $5 million would go to ONC to see that data is shared securely and privacy is protected.
However, some commentators suggest that the President’s proposed budget will not be sufficient to support the program’s goals. For instance, biologist Keith Yamamoto told the science website Nature: “It’s not even close.”
