Volume 385, Issue 9986, 20 June 2015
WORLD REPORT Officials expect to launch the US President’s new health project later this year. But Congress has yet to decide whether to fully fund it. The Lancet’s Washington correspondent, Susan Jaffe, reports.
While continuing to defend his besieged health-care reform law against lawsuits and repeal threats, US President Barack Obama is championing a new health initiative. This one also has a bold goal: to radically change the medical treatment patients receive in the USA. “I want the country that eliminated polio and mapped the human genome to lead a new era of medicine—one that delivers the right treatment at the right time”, the President said when he unveiled his Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) in his annual State of the Union address to the nation in January. …Central to the PMI will be the creation of a research cohort of 1 million US volunteers who agree to provide researchers with biological, environmental, lifestyle, and other information as well as tissue samples….The effort to vastly expand the scope and practice of individually designed treatments based on genetic information could revolutionise medicine, supporters say. But the success of the PMI depends on whether Congress agrees to fund it. [Continued in full text or PDF ]