Washington, Jan 31 (IANS) US President Barack Obama has sought $215 million for an effort that will match patients’ genetic and physiological data to treat their health conditions more precisely.
Obama proposed the plan, known as the “Precision Medicine Initiativea, in his annual State of the Union address last week.
Details of the plan come as Obama prepares to release his fiscal year 2016 budget request to Congress Feb 2, the scientific journal Nature reported.
The White House is seeking $130 million for the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a national cohort of at least one million volunteers for a longitudinal study.
Their medical, physiological and genomic data would be integrated in a massive database that would be made available to researchers.
The US Food and Drug Administration would receive $10 million to build databases to support precision-medicine research and regulation as part of the initiative.
According to Keith Yamamoto, biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, the budget outlined by Obama will not be sufficient to achieve the programme’s goals.
“It is not even close,” Yamamoto added.
But he is optimistic that researchers working for the programme would still discover genetic correlations and risk factors for disease that could improve treatments.