Washington, Jan 31
US President Barack Obama
Friday unveiled the details of a bold new research effort, which brought
doctors "closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes".
According
to a Xinhua report, Obama said that the precision medicine initiative
"brings America closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes, and
gives all of us access, potentially, to the personalised information
that we need to keep ourselves and our families healthier".
Obama,
who first mentioned the initiative in his State of the Union address
Jan 20, has called for an investment of $215 million for the initiative,
in the 2016 budget proposal, which he would send to the Congress next
week.
The US president noted that doctors have always tried to
come up with personalised treatments for patients, such as matching
blood transfusion to a blood type.
"What if matching a cancer
cure to our genetic code was just as easy, just as standard?" he asked
at an event on the initiative at the White House. "What if figuring out
the right dose of medicine was as simple as taking our temperature?"
"That's
the promise of precision medicine -- delivering the right treatments,
at the right time, every time to the right person," Obama said.
Most existing medical treatments were considered to be just a "one-size-fits-all approach", designed for the "average patient".
As a result, such treatments can be very successful for some patients, but not for others, according to a White House statement.
The
new initiative, however, provides “tools to better understand the
complex mechanisms underlying a patient's health, disease, or condition,
and to better predict which treatments will be most effective," the
statement said.
It stressed that advances in precision medicine
have already led to "a transformation in the way we can treat diseases
such as cancer".
Patients with breast, lung, and colorectal
cancers, as well as melanoma and leukaemia are now routinely undergoing
molecular testing as part of patient care, and their doctors are
choosing treatments based on this information.
The funding Obama
wanted for the initiative would include $130 million for the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) to create a voluntary national research group
of a million or more volunteers.
This project will "leverage
existing research and clinical networks and build on innovative research
models", the White House said.
The NIH's National Cancer
Institute would receive $70 million to scale up efforts to identify
genomic drivers in cancer and apply that knowledge in the development of
more effective approaches to cancer treatment.
A total of $10
million would go to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to develop
new approaches for evaluating next-generation genetic tests.
Another
$5 million would go to the Office of the National Coordinator for
Health Information Technology to support the development of standards
that address privacy and enable secure exchange of data across systems.
"So
the precision medicine initiative we're launching today will lay the
foundation for a new generation of lifesaving discoveries," Obama said,
adding that there's bipartisan support for the research plan.
