The National Institutes of Health (NIH) defines “precision medicine” as
[A]n emerging health care model for disease treatment and prevention strategies that takes into account each person’s genetic variations, environment and lifestyle.1
Precision medicine was thrust into the national conversation in 2015 when President Obama announced a $215 million U.S. funding commitment known as the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI).2 In President Obama’s words, the goal of precision medicine is to provide clinicians with new tools, knowledge, and therapies that will enable them to select “the right treatments,
at the right time, every time to the right person.”3
PMI drastically expanded precision medicine’s presence in scientific research. As evidence, later this year, the PMI cohort program, “All of Us,” will begin enrolling participants in a million person data set of genetic, lifestyle, and health information for further study of the interaction of genetics, environment, and lifestyle.4
Though scientists disagree about the extent to which precision medicine will translate into genuine improvements in health care delivery, even the most skeptical of experts cannot deny recent advancements in genetic testing and targeted therapeutics.5
Read the entire article, which was originally published in the April 2018 issue of AHLA Connections.
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