President Obama will seek hundreds of millions of dollars for a new initiative to develop medical treatments tailored to genetic and other characteristics of individual patients, administration officials say.
The proposal, mentioned briefly in his State of the Union address, will be described in greater detail in his budget in the coming weeks. The effort is likely to receive support from members of both parties, lawmakers said.
“This is an incredible area of promise,” said Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana and a gastroenterologist. “There will be bipartisan support.”
Mr. Obama called it precision medicine, but the terms “personalized medicine” and “individualized medicine” are also widely used to describe the evolving field in which, for example, a doctor prescribes a medication that targets a specific mutation in a patient’s genes.
The money would support biomedical research at the National Institutes of Health and the regulation of diagnostic tests by the Food and Drug Administration, officials at the two agencies said.
The tests analyze the DNA in normal or diseased tissue. Doctors use that information to identify patients with cancer or other diseases who are most likely to benefit from a particular treatment — and those who would be harmed or not respond at all.
Read full, original article: Obama to Request Research Funding for Treatments Tailored to Patients’ DNA
