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.
Well have we not been doing this for a few decades. We have BRCA for breast cancer, BRAF for melanoma, we have translocations for CML and we have tones of putative diagnostic and prognostic tests for almost every cancer. So just what is new?
The we have in the same piece:
“Cancer,” he said, “is a disease of faulty genes. The goal of personalized medicine is to understand the unique characteristics of individual patients so therapies can be tailored to genetic mutations that underlie their disease.”
Well, kind of. If you assume that epigenetic factors such a miRNAs and methylation are genes in some broad sense.
The proposal is:
Federal
officials described the project as a research consortium that would
collect information from large numbers of people. The data could include
medical records, laboratory test results, profiles of patients’ genes,
and information about their diet, tobacco use, lifestyle and
environment. The president’s budget request,
to be unveiled on Monday, includes $130 million for the consortium,
White House officials said. In addition, they said, ..... will
request $70 million for the National Cancer Institute, the largest of
the National Institutes of Health
units, to investigate genes that may contribute to the risk of
developing certain types of cancer, and then to use that knowledge in
developing more effective treatments.
So we will start to collect all of this info. I am a bit confused. Did we not hand out a few billion to docs to get EHR systems and that under meaningful use they were supposed to be doing this now. So what is the added millions for again?
Posts
