Obama makes remarks highlighting investments to improve health and treat disease through precision medicine while in the East Room of the White House in Washington. A 17 base pair DNA model is seen next to Obama.

AFP/Reuters/Washington

President Barack Obama has unveiled plans to plough $215mn into “precision medicine” research, a field that he said provided “boundless” promise for the treatment of diseases like cancer and diabetes.
The field – which aims to tailor treatment to individual patients – “gives us one of the greatest opportunities for new medical breakthrough that we have ever seen”, Obama said.
The funding would be used in part to collect gene, biochemical, lifestyle and other data from one million volunteers.
Scientists believe that vast bank of information could then lead to better classification of diseases – based on molecular causes rather than symptoms – as well as tailored treatment that replaces a “one size fits all” approach.
The proposal is part of Obama’s 2016 budget plan, which would first have to be approved by a hostile Republican-controlled Congress.
“The time is right to unleash a new wave of advancements in this area,” Obama said.
He said the move would “lay the foundation for a new generation of lifesaving discoveries”.
“There is no telling how many lives we could change,” he said.
During his recent State of the Union address, Obama said he wanted “the country that eliminated polio and mapped the human genome to lead a new era of medicine.”
Officials hope genetic data from several hundred thousand participants in ongoing genetic studies would be used, and other volunteers recruited to reach the 1mn total.
The near-term goal is to create more and better treatments for cancer, Dr Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), told reporters on a conference call on Thursday.
Longer term, he said, the project would provide information on how to individualise treatment for a range of diseases.
The initial focus on cancer, he said, is due partly to the lethality of the disease and partly because targeted medicine, known also as precision medicine, has made significant advances in cancer, although much more work is needed.
Out of the $215mn for the initiative, $130mn would go to the NIH to fund the research cohort and $70mn to NIH’s National Cancer Institute to intensify efforts to identify molecular drivers of cancer and apply that knowledge to drug development.
A further $10mn would go to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to develop databases on which to build an appropriate regulatory structure; $5mn would go to the Office of the National Co-ordinator for Health Information Technology to develop privacy standards and ensure the secure exchange of data.
The funding is not nearly enough to sequence 1mn genomes from scratch.
Whole-genome sequencing, though plummeting in price, still costs about $1,000 per genome, Collins said, meaning this component alone would cost $1bn.
Instead, he said, the national cohort would be assembled both from new volunteers interested in “an opportunity to take part in something historic”, and existing cohorts that are already linking genomic data to medical outcomes.