During the 2015 State of the Union Address this week, President Barack Obama announced several new plans and initiatives. One of them is a “Precision Medicine Initiative,” that he hopes will, “bring us closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes — and to give all of us access to the personalized information we need to keep ourselves and our families healthier”.
But what will this “Precision Medicine Initiative” actually look like? Xconomy asked two geneticists, National Medal of Science recipient Leroy Hood and Tute’s own Chief Scientific Officer David Mittelman, to shed some light on what we might be able to expect from this initiative. Here is a summary of their comments:
Biologist Leroy Hood invented the machines that made the Human Genome project possible. He hopes that the President’s initiative will result in an organization (perhaps one that builds on/is similar to the Human Genome Project). He hopes for more computational tools to trace the origin of disease and thinks that there is great potential in the possibility of having portable technologies such as smartphones be primary diagnostic tools.
Tute CSO David Mittelman would like to see, “improvements in the identification of complex mutations such as copy-number variations and splice variants,” and, “more experimental data on the consequences of genetic changes” from the initiative. Thirdly, Mittelman says there is a need for, “better standards, performance testing, and calibration of the variety of sequencing methods and processes available,”; complicated measures that usually require government funding. He points out, “We can’t have personalized medicine if every instrument or clinical group gets a different answer.”
Here at Tute, precision medicine is one of our core goals. We are excited and interested to see how this initiative will affect the industry moving forward.
You can read Xconomy’s full article here.