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White House announces push for individualized medicine

The White House says the money will help doctors better understand the idiosyncrasies of the human genome and how those specifics affect medical care.

By Brooks Hays
President Barack Obama mentioned the importance of personalized medicine when he deliverd the State of The Union address on January 20, 2015 at the US Capitol in Washington, DC. Pool photo by Mandel Ngan/UPI.
President Barack Obama mentioned the importance of personalized medicine when he deliverd the State of The Union address on January 20, 2015 at the US Capitol in Washington, DC. Pool photo by Mandel Ngan/UPI. | License Photo

WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 (UPI) -- A new initiative announced by President Barack Obama on Friday will see renewed efforts to collect more than a million genetic samples for research on individualized medical treatments.

Personalized or targeted medicine is the future of healthcare, doctors say. But from a research and execution standpoint, it's currently only in its infancy. The basic idea is that the specifics of a person's genetic makeup, or genome, can dictate the types of treatments and medications ideal for each individual.

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But in order to execute such an idea, researchers need to better understand the idiosyncrasies of the human genome and how those specifics affect medical care.

Research is ongoing on this front, with some basic personalized delivery techniques already in use in the treatment of some cancers, but by all accounts, doctors are only just hitting the tip of the iceberg.

"Cancer is a disease of faulty genes," Mark E. Fleury, a public policy researcher with the American Cancer Society's Cancer Action Network, told The New York Times. "The goal of personalized medicine is to understand the unique characteristics of individual patients so therapies can be tailored to genetic mutations that underlie their disease."

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Friday's announcement is a follow-up to the president's mention of personalized medicine in his State of the Union address. The idea is the same, only this time there's a price tag.

Obama announced his new budget proposal for 2015 would include $215 million for the Precision Medicine Initiative -- money that would go toward collecting a larger databank of genetic samples and toward studies related to personalized treatments.

"Through collaborative public and private efforts, the Precision Medicine Initiative will leverage advances in genomics, emerging methods for managing and analyzing large data sets while protecting privacy, and health information technology to accelerate biomedical discoveries," White House officials wrote in a statement released prior to the announcement.

In addition to providing funding for an expanded genetic databank and new studies at the National Institutes of Health, the initiative will also spearhead an overhaul of FDA regulations related to personalized medicine and push the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to develop improve privacy standards for genetic research.

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