WASHINGTON — President Obama on Friday will announce a major biomedical research initiative, including plans to collect genetic data on one million Americans so that scientists can develop drugs and treatments tailored to individual patients’ specific characteristics, administration officials said.
Dr. Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, said the studies would help doctors decide which treatments would work best for which patients.
White House officials said the “precision medicine initiative,” also known as personalized or individualized medicine, would begin with a down payment of $215 million in the president’s budget request for the fiscal year that starts on Oct. 1.
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Research institutions like the Moffitt Cancer Center in Florida, the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York have personalized medicine programs, but the federal effort is a work in progress.
“Many details about how this initiative is going to be designed and operated are still in the process of being worked out,” Dr. Collins said. The government, he added, will appoint a panel of advisers to “help us put real specifics into what is now an exciting but somewhat general plan.”
