Remember the “Precision Medicine Initiative” that President Obama announced in the State of the Union address a couple weeks ago? We speculated about what it might look like here.
Today, the White House announced a plan to allocate $215 million to President Obama’s Precision Healthcare Initiative. There are several prongs of the proposed plan:
- $130 million to NIH for development of a voluntary national research cohort of a million or more volunteers to propel understanding of health and disease
- $70 million to the National Cancer Institute (part of the NIH), to identify genomic drivers in cancer and apply that knowledge in the development of more effective approaches to cancer treatment.
- $10 million to FDA to acquire additional expertise and advance the development of high quality, curated databases to support the regulatory structure needed to advance innovation in precision medicine and protect public health.
- $5 million to ONC to support the development of interoperability standards and requirements that address privacy and enable secure exchange of data across systems (basically, to make it all happen technology-wise).
While this is just the first stage in the complicated process of putting the initiative to work in the real world, it’s very welcome news. We agree with Forbes:
“Having the government, as well as industry, collect this data will make all of it – from genomics to mobile health – more open and free. And that can only mean better science for everyone.”
Better, more open science is a great thing.