Last week the White House released details about a new Precision Medicine Initiative, which will be launched with a $215 million investment proposed in the President’s 2016 Budget. The purpose of the initiative is to accelerate biomedical discoveries and provide clinicians with novel tools by pioneering a new model of patient-powered research. The budget includes an allocation of $130 million to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the development of a national research cohort of a million or more volunteers, and $70 million to the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to scale up efforts to identify genomic drivers in cancer. According to a commentary co-authored by NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the long-term aim will be to generate knowledge applicable to the whole range of health and disease.
