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The development of personalized medicine is ready to help more than 1 million volunteers
Last reviewed: 16.05.2018
The Administration of the President of the United States in conjunction with the Institute of Health announced the launch of new programs, the goal of which is precision medicine. One of the programs will involve 1 million volunteers (it is planned to collect the required number of participants in 3 years).
The main goal of the program will be to check the relationship between physical activity, health, heredity and external impact.
The President of the United States made a statement about conducting clinical trials more than a year ago. The purpose of such medicine is to find and develop a personal approach to treatment, taking into account all the features of a single patient. Experts propose to collect in a single database a huge amount of data - health status, lifestyle, hereditary factors of development of certain diseases, as well as status in society and the economic situation.
Vanderbilt University will implement the programs, which received a grant for the first stage - a set of participants. Consultations within the programs will be provided by Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences).
This year, about 80 thousand people will be brought to participate, among which 50 thousand will be selected through statements that came directly to the organizers.
Presumably, in summer it will be known which stages will be included in this large-scale study. It is quite clear that several medical organizations will be selected in order to recruit the remaining volunteers, and a single coordinating center and biological bank will be created in which information of all participants (DNA) will be stored.
The Health Institute 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 involve companies to develop special devices to automatically collect information about participants and monitor the ethical side of clinical research.
The Ministry for Veterans Affairs has already selected participants from among the military who will take part in the DNA research program necessary to develop personal approaches to treatment.
Also, the administration of the US President, along with organizations, including institutions and patient associations, intends to promote personalized medicine among the population. Some medical centers will provide patients with records of specialists and medical history, and the Stanford University plans to publish genetic information about 80 Americans of Iranian origin who have agreed to study their own DNA.
According to preliminary data, only this year the research costs will amount to more than $ 120 million, and in the next will exceed 200 million. In general, more than 1 billion dollars will be spent on the development of precision medicine. Last spring, the launch of the project to develop personalized medicine was spent $ 3 million, which was provided by the Governor of California.