With a million volunteers to study, doctors may be able to correlate genes and disease more confidently.
Precision medicine includes all the stuff that makes you, you -- your DNA, the stuff inside your gut, your family history -- into medical care.
Now, President Barack Obama wants to funnel $215 million into a "Precision Medicine Initiative," with the hope of one day incorporating things like a person’s genome into everyday medical treatment.
George Weinstock said doctors have always done this, but that "as time goes on, and a particular medical treatment becomes more refined, because we have more knowledge about it -- it becomes more precise," he said.
Weinstock is a professor and a researcher at the Jackson Laboratory in Farmington. Today, he said, modern technology and genetic mapping make medicine much more precise. Cancers can be more accurately defined and treated thanks to DNA sequencing and entire genomes can be studied to understand the role family history plays in disease.
"On the one hand, you have all of this new genetic information that's been coming since the human genome project and you now need to match that up -- correlate it very precisely -- with different clinical conditions, different clinical outcomes," he said.
Last week, Weinstock traveled to Washington, D.C., to be there when the White House announced how the Obama administration plans to fast-track that correlation.
As part of the overall "Precision Medicine Initiative," Obama wants to set aside $130 million for a voluntary national research group of a million patients. Their genomes would be sequenced, and their medical history shared with doctors.
"Because any particular health trait can be caused by many, many different genetic changes, you need to have very large groups of people," Weinstock said. "So you can see all the different ways a particular trait is caused, based on the genetics."
To date, Weinstock said the study pools of most the largest studies have peaked in the tens of thousands. But with a million volunteers, he said doctors could make more confident correlations between genes and disease -- and quickly translate those correlations into practical care.
Obama's proposal also calls for $70 million to the National Cancer Institute and $15 million for the development of better medical data-sharing systems.
