NIH Forms Precision Medicine Panel

The National Institutes of Health has appointed an expert panel to detail the way forward for the White House’s Precision Medicine Initiative. The research plan, first proposed by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union speech earlier this year, would look at the role that differences among individuals play in health to help doctors devise individualized treatment and prevention strategies. Obama called for $215 million for the initiative in his 2016 budget proposal. More than half of this funding would go toward recruiting 1 million-plus participants to donate tissue samples and provide biological, lifestyle, environmental, and behavioral information for research. The panel will lay out a vision and goals for this immense project. Chairs of the panel are Richard Lifton, a geneticist at Yale University; Bray Patrick-Lake, a clinical trial expert at Duke University; and Kathy Hudson, deputy director of science, outreach, and policy at NIH.