Obama seeks $213m to fund “precision medicine”

In his 2016 budget submitted to Congress today President Barack Obama has asked for $213m (£140m; €190m) to fund a “precision medicine” initiative. The initiative would include a $130m program to create a “national research cohort” of a million or more volunteers whose genetic, medical, and lifestyle data would be collected for biomedical research.

Speaking at a White House event to announce the initiative on 30 January, Obama said that the goal of the precision medicine initiative will be to understand the differences between people, such as differences in their genetic makeup, to enable individualized treatments that would be most likely to be effective for each person. The approach, Obama said, promised to make it possible to deliver “the right treatments, at …