Community health centers, regional medical centers and universities are being awarded a total of $55 million for recruiting people to participate in President Obama’s precision medicine initiative, the White House announced Wednesday.
It’s the second batch of awards for those helping form a one million-person pool of volunteers agreeing to share their genetic data to help scientists make advances in precision medicine, a new frontier of medicine where targeted cures are based on genetic makeup.
Laying out more details about how the cohort will work, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins stressed that it will include a diverse group of Americans who will be viewed as partners in the research process, rather than subjects.
“The cohort will present the rich diversity of America,” Collins said. “Rich and poor, urban and rural and all races and ethnicities.”
Several organizations will help recruit the volunteers and build the infrastructure needed to store vast amounts of their genetic information and make it easily accessible for researchers.
Columbia University in New York City, Northwestern University in Chicago, University of Arizona and University of Pittsburgh are being awarded grants to bring volunteers on board. So are six federally qualified health centers in Tennessee, Connecticut, South Carolina, New York, Mississippi and California, which will help ensure low-income people are among the participants.
Officials also said a grant is going to Vanderbilt University, which will create the data infrastructure for the million-person pool by working with Verily, the new name for Google Health. Getting the pool up and running is expected to take three to four years.
President Obama announced his precision medicine initiative in January 2015, saying he wants to invest heavily in the new field, which has led to effective treatments for certain types of cancer and has excited researchers with its possibilities for cures for other diseases as well.
Scientists describe precision medicine as “the right treatment to the right person at the right time.” It allows doctors to personalize treatments based on a patient’s genes and the specific makeup of their disease.
The grantees met at NIH headquarters in Bethesda, Md., on Wednesday, officials said. They will be led by Eric Dishman, the former general manager of Intel’s Health Strategy and Solutions Group.
