Precision Medicine

At 11:00am today, Barack Obama announced a $215 million endeavor known as the Precision Medicine Initiative. That may seem like a large price tag (it is), but let's briefly highlight what the initiative includes and why it's important for science: 1. $130 million will go to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a voluntary cohort of research volunteers (at least a million) for a long term study on overall health. This initiative is intended to measure everything, from eating habits to data on exercise to the composition of their genomes.  These huge cohort studies have already been established in the UK and Japan, so it's about time that we pursued it here in the United States.

Such studies are very important. Although time consuming and pricy, data like this will help solve important questions regarding the effect of different lifestyles on the body. It'll also help scientist analyze how large of an effect your genetics has on your different aspects of your life. For example, let's take that group of 1,000,000 people and follow them throughout their life. Down the line, if we noticed that 10,000 become morbidly obese, we can look to see if there are any genetic components that these people have in common that would predispose them to such a state. The possibilities are pretty much endless with huge data sets like this - and if the data remains largely accessible, it'll be a huge boon to scientific research.

Figure 1: Let's take a closer look at this, shall we?

2. $70 million wil go to the National Cancer Institute (part of the NIH) to map "genomic drivers" in cancer and apply this knowledge to developing treatments.

Cancer is a very tricky disease. Unlike diseases that are caused by a specific mutation or other agent (such as a bacteria), cancer can be caused by a huge variety of genetic mutations. Our understanding of what mutations cause what cancers is still in its infancy, so great knowledge in this field will hopefully lead to smarter therapies.

The idea of precision medicine has been here for a while now, but newer technologies has been making advances in this area more of a reality. One of the largest problems in treating any disease is that not a single person on this earth is the same, especially on the genetic level. Prescribing the same dose of the same drug for thousands of people with a similar disease seems kind of silly, doesn't?

Precision or personalized medicine seeks to address that problem by tailoring treatments to the individual patient, based on their individual genetics and needs. Efforts in understanding the subtle nuances that govern each disease will help us know what to look out for in people, which will hopefully lead to more effective treatments!

P.S. The remaining cash in this initiative will be used to set up the databases/data transfer agreements that will make generating this much data possible!