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More than 1 million volunteers are ready to help develop personalized medicine
Last reviewed: 02.07.2025
The US presidential administration, together with the Institute of Health, announced the launch of new programs aimed at precision medicine. One of the programs will involve 1 million volunteers (they plan to collect the required number of participants in 3 years).
The main goal of the program will be to test the relationship between physical activity, health, heredity and external influences.
The President of the United States made a statement about conducting clinical trials more than a year ago. The goal of such medicine is to find and develop a personal approach to treatment, taking into account all the characteristics of an individual patient. Specialists propose to collect in a single database a colossal amount of data - health status, lifestyle, hereditary factors in the development of certain diseases, as well as social status and economic situation.
The programs will be implemented by Vanderbilt University, which received a grant to conduct the first stage - recruitment of participants. Consulting within the framework of the programs will be provided by Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences).
This year, approximately 80,000 people will be invited to participate, of which 50,000 will be selected through applications submitted directly to the organizers.
It is expected that in the summer it will be known which stages will be included in this large-scale study. It is absolutely clear that several medical organizations will be selected to recruit the remaining volunteers, and a single coordination center and a biological bank will be created, in which information from all participants (DNA) will be stored.
The Institute of Health plans to work with medical centers, whose patients can also become participants in the study (presumably, patients with limited access to medical services will be selected). In addition, the Institute plans to create a special commission that will attract companies to develop special devices for the automatic collection of information about participants and monitor the ethical side of clinical trials.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has already selected military participants to take part in a DNA study program to develop personalized treatment approaches.
The US presidential administration is also working with organizations including institutes and patient groups to promote personalized medicine among the population. Some medical centers will provide patients with specialist and medical records, and Stanford University plans to publish the genetic information of about 80 Iranian-Americans who have agreed to have their DNA studied.
According to preliminary data, this year alone, the research costs will be more than $120 million, and next year they will exceed $200 million. In total, more than $1 billion will be spent on the development of precision medicine. Last spring, $3 million was spent on the launch of the project for the development of personalized medicine, which was provided by the Governor of California.