Obama announces acceleration of Precision Medicines Initiative
pharmafile | February 26, 2016 | News story | Medical Communications, Research and Development | Obama, Precision Medicine, cancer moonshot, genomics
A year after Barack Obama announced the $200 million Precision Medicines Initiative (PMI), the US President yesterday outlined the next steps in the effort to study the genomes of one million people by 2019, with the goal of advancing the development of targeted treatments for cancer and other diseases.
Speaking at a White House summit with leaders of the healthcare and science community, Obama said the initiative aims to usher in a new era of medicine that would harness huge amounts of data to advance research. He said: “This is an extraordinarily exciting time. We may be able to accelerate the process of discovering cures in ways that we’ve never seen before.”
Updating on plans announced last year for a one million-person ‘cohort’ of those willing to share their genetic and health data to help accelerate understanding of disease and the development of better treatments, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced the first steps to setting up the database, and provided a grant to Vanderbilt University and Alphabet’s Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences), to recruit patients to the scheme. Obama said data from the cohort would help scientists find patterns in rare diseases.
Precision medicine is an approach that seeks to abandon a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to drug development and implementation, instead taking into consideration the individual characteristics of patients, using the data from projects such as the cohort to provide better-targeted treatments for various ailments, based on genetic variants. It is thought this will result in superior outcomes for patients, as well as efficiency savings in healthcare systems.
Yesterday, the US Government also announced a collaboration with the Health Resources and Services Administration to begin partnerships with several health centres, to ensure the diversity of the cohort was reflective of that of the US.
Amongst the many additional announcements, the Food and Drugs Administration also launched the first precisionFDA challenge, which will use the new precision platform “to encourage the genomics community to advance quality standards and achieve more consistent and accurate DNA test results, advancing the goal of better personalised care.”
The full list of actions from yesterday’s PMI announcements can be found here.
The accelerations in the PMI follow the President’s launch in January of the Cancer Moonshot 2020 – a scheme which seeks to advance the development of next-generation immunotherapies with the ultimate goal of curing the disease.
Joel Levy
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