Typically when President Obama talks about healthcare, it’s on the highly charged topic of Obamacare. But in his recent address to Congress he focused on something a lot more bipartisan: personalized medicine.
The president proposed investing more in the cutting-edge field where doctors can individualize care based on a patient’s genetic makeup. It’s an issue congressional leaders have focused on for the past year, and Obama’s proposal also earned wide applause from medical groups, who have long worried about cuts to medical research.
“I want the country that eliminated polio and mapped the human genome to lead a new era of medicine — one that delivers the right treatment at the right time,” the president said, adding that he wants new investment to “bring us closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes.”
Obama didn’t offer more specifics on where he’d like the research focused, how it should be funded or at what level. Those details could come in his annual budget proposal, expected Feb. 2.
His push for more medical research appears timely. For the last year, Rep. Fred Upton, GOP leader of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., have held a series of hearings on speeding up the discovery, development and delivery of new cures. One of them, held in July, focused on personalized medicine.
Dubbing their work “21st Century Cures,” they’re now working on bipartisan legislation to address some of the goals laid out last year. Lawmakers haven’t yet settled on details, but DeGette spokesman Matt Inzeo said personalized medicine is “exactly the type of space we’re working in right now.
“Things will start to move in a more public way here in the relatively near future,” he said.
Last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell praised Upton and DeGette’s efforts, emphasizing that she wants to work with Congress on the matter.
“A few months back, when Republican Rep. Fred Upton and Democrat Rep. Diana DeGette invited me to attend a panel on ’21st Century Cures,’ I said ‘Where and when?’ ” Burwell said. “Because I firmly believe that we have many common-ground opportunities to work together.”
In his speech Obama also called for doubling spending on researching antibiotic-resistant bacteria — infectious organisms that have adapted to the drugs designed to kill them. And he talked about continuing to invest in the BRAIN initiative he announced in 2013, a project aimed at mapping brain activity that could lead to new remedies for brain disorders.
But despite bipartisan backing, the proposals look like tall orders after years of cuts that officials say are hindering the country’s progress towards developing new treatments.
Last fall, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins said an Ebola vaccine probably would have been developed by now if the agency’s budget hadn’t been cut over the last decade. NIH got $29.9 billion last year, a 3.5 percent increase over the year before. But that’s still below its $31 billion budget in 2010.
“Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready,” Collins told the Huffington Post in October.
Personalized medicine is one of the most exciting fields of research, say scientists, because through it they’re able to treat patients based on their own particular genetic mutations and more effectively combat diseases that have challenged the medical community.
Cancer research is a good example. Over the last several decades, scientists progressed from believing cancer was a single disease to understanding that different varieties of cancer — like lung cancer or breast cancer — are actually quite different from each other. Now they’re learning that even within one type of cancer there are many different mutations.
This kind of research is overwhelmingly funded by the federal government, so health advocates said they were glad to hear Obama prioritize the issue. But actually getting more funding is a whole different question, as the president’s budget is little more than a wish list the GOP-led Congress isn’t likely to pay much attention to.
“It’s getting harder and harder for scientists to get their research projects funded, so there’s a tremendous opportunity right now,” said Mark Fleury, a policy principal at the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. “A lot of other countries are increasing their biomedical research funding right now and taking advantage of those amazing opportunities we don’t have right now.”
The Advanced Medical Technology Association said it looks forward to the details of Obama’s proposal.
“That the administration would include molecular research in the State of the Union as a national priority is very exciting and reflective of the role personalized medicine will play in the future,” said Wanda Moebius, the group’s vice president for public affairs.
