Last week, President Obama held a meeting unveiling details about the Precision Medicine Initiative, an audacious research effort to revolutionize how we practice medicine and ultimately improve human health. At the center of this bold new initiative lies a huge new biobank containing electronic medical records and genetic information on more than a million Americans. Our very own Chief Medical Officer, David Shaywitz, joined the other personalized medicine stakeholders at the White House to weigh in as President Obama made the historic announcement. You can read David’s own first hand account of his visit to the White House here.
Developing cures for complex diseases is incredibly complicated, and the President’s initiative requires long-term vision. Already, the underlying sentiment seems to be that the reality of genomic medicine is here today, in the case of cancer, and targeted therapies are becoming increasingly common. But the realization of a more complete understanding of human genetics, one that will drive discovery and improve human health, requires deep, accurate, and accessible integration of genomic and phenotypic data from millions of people.
The development of a US biobank will require three distinct executional elements: creating, integrating, and analyzing complex data sets. Each of these elements presents unique and difficult challenges, but experience tells us that none are impossible. President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative calls for national implementation of solutions very similar to those developed by DNAnexus in collaboration with Regeneron Genetics Center and Geisinger Health System, and Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology (CHARGE), Baylor College of Medicine’s Human Genome Sequencing Center (HGSC), and other partners.
A cloud-based genome informatics and data management platform like DNAnexus combines state-of-the-art security with fluid data sharing among researchers, providing a collaborative environment that facilitates and promotes insight and discovery. And that’s exactly what the White House is betting on. These are exciting times, and we are thrilled to be participating, alongside our partners, at the front lines of innovation and policy.
