President Obama’s ambitious precision medicine initiative faces some major obstacles requiring new scientific approaches, two researchers write in the latest issue of the journal Science.
The president has charged the National Institutes of Health with forming a cohort of 1 million Americans who will allow researchers to sequence their DNA and store it in a massive database to be used for research purposes. The project is aimed at furthering a relatively new medical field known as precision medicine, which provides targeted cures for individuals based on their genetic makeup.
But precision medicine often requires using what are known as “biomarkers” to assess, monitor or predict a patient’s health. And using biomarkers instead of traditional clinical trials to develop cures can lead to a host of problems, such as misclassifying illnesses, which could translate to worse patient outcomes, according to researchers Spencer Hey and Aaron Kesselheim.
“President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative is a promising development, but it is not clear that its focus on developing a large patient cohort to produce new knowledge about disease etiology and management will substantially affect the inefficiencies,” they wrote.
Hey and Kesselheim, who are research fellows at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, say precision medicine can be improved if NIH and the Food and Drug Administration create maps showing the research for each biomarker, which could help detangle some of the complex problems facing researchers.
“The approach to [precision medicine] inquiry we have outlined, which should be led by public research institutions, will help achieve the promise that the field offers,” they wrote.
Health officials recently outlined some specific goals and methods they will use in assembling the million-person pool of volunteers. NIH Director Francis Collins has said the project will take at least several years to complete.
