Obama cited privacy issues and patient access to this health data as a primary concern, but said this is an issue that can be sorted out.
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The Vanderbilt/Verily coordinating center will manage the project, including the collection of data from a network of healthcare provider organizations, a “biobank” to store and manage biological specimens provided by participants and a participant technologies center, according to the report.
Lussier collaborates closely with Dr. Kenneth S. Ramos, associate vice president for precision health sciences, director of the UA Center for Applied Genetics and Genomic Medicine and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, to advance precision health research and clinical care in Arizona with special emphasis in the adoption of precision medicine approaches and tools to address health disparities.
The National Institutes of Health on Thursday announced first steps to set up the database so it can begin recruiting soon.
Cavatica will support CHOP’s commitment to the White House Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) through the newly launched Center for Data Driven Discovery in Biomedicine (D3b), located at CHOP.
“We are thrilled to put our expertise and technology to work to support the Precision Medicine Initiative”, said Rob Bearden, chief executive officer, Hortonworks. “I’m confident that at least for Malia and Sasha’s generation, they’re going to be able to make progress and live healthier lives in ways that we could not imagine”, he said.
One challenge is how to ensure drug companies develop affordable therapies targeted to smaller numbers of patients rather than focusing on blockbusters.
“This pilot approach will help us learn how to create durable relationships with volunteers, who are partners in the research process, who will lay the foundation for a democratized, transformative research environment”, he said.
Central to the President’s PMI is development of a research cohort to engage 1 million or more Americans who would volunteer their health data for research purposes. Obama is asking Congress for $309 million next year to scale up the initiative, nearly all of it for NIH. Recursion’s high-throughput analysis platform will provide data to precisely model the effect of treatments at a genetic level, contributing the quick analysis that is vital to the success of personalized medicine. At the UA, he leads efforts to fully develop novel programs in biomedical informatics, computational genomics and precision health.
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Chirag Patil, MD, associate professor of Neurosurgery and a neurosurgeon in the Department of Neurosurgery, was selected by the Obama administration to lend his expertise at the summit, which will feature remarks by the president, patient stories and roundtable discussions to build momentum and collaborations around precision medicine initiatives.
