President Obama Announces Precision Medicine Initiative
President Obama’s State of The Union speech covered a large quantity of topics on Tuesday night in which technology and science became prominent themes. In the middle of his address, the commander-in-chief briefly announced a new program for “precision medicine.”
“Tonight, I’m launching a new Precision Medicine Initiative to bring us closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes--and to give us all access to the personalized information we need to keep ourselves and our families healthier,” the president said.
Although he didn’t specify exact details of this plan, the president stated that he wanted the country that “eliminated polio and mapped the human genome” to lead the world into a new stage of modern medicine.
The purpose of precision medicine is to engineer disease treatments that perfectly match an individual’s needs.
One crucial part of this process involves closely analyzing a person’s genetic and molecular makeup. Companies like 23andMe offer affordable genetic testing and it is possible to harness data to reach more refined diagnoses and improved medications. This approach has yielded some encouraging accomplishments in combatting chronic diseases.
President Obama invited William Elder Jr. to the State of The Union as one of his guests. Elder Jr., 27, is a Stanford University graduate afflicted with cystic fibrosis (CF).
Elder Jr.’s brief biography on the White House website explains that “most doctors wouldn’t have expected him to live long,” but he was part of a small group of patients who received an experimental treatment for CF that targeted the underlying causes of the disease. The White House touted him as an example of how powerful precision medicine can be in treating a disease that has no cure.
However, this field is experiencing a few growing pains. The Verge notes that the nature of breakthrough treatments like Elder Jr.’s are “usually not applicable to the population at large” because there is no way to deliver something like this to a large group.
The validity of genetic testing is still being debated as 23andMe recovers from several sanctions the FDA placed on it last year.
Ezekiel Emanuel, bioethicist and healthcare reform adviser to the White House, told CNBC in an interview that he was dubious in terms of how President Obama’s precision medicine plan would affect the overall healthcare industry.
“I would be skeptical that precision therapy will be how we control costs,” he said.
Bloomberg reports that the Obama administration views this medical research as a new policy that the Republicans in Congress could help move forward. The full plan for this project is expected to be unveiled in President Obama’s budget plan for 2016 on February 2.
