Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by the editors of HealthDay:
Obama to Launch Research Program Focused on Personalized Medicine
Personalized medicine is the focus of a major research program to be announced Friday by President Barack Obama.
Administration officials said it will include the collection of genetic data on one million Americans in order to help scientists develop drugs and other treatments tailored to individual patients' characteristics, The New York Times reported.
The initiative will help doctors determine which treatments work best for which patients, according to Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health.
The research program would begin with an initial $215 million included in the president's budget request for the fiscal year that starts on Oct. 1, The Times reported.
"Many details about how this initiative is going to be designed and operated are still in the process of being worked out," Collins said. The government will create a panel of advisers to "help us put real specifics into what is now an exciting but somewhat general plan."
Since the 1990s, scientists have been collecting and storing human tissue and other biological specimens in what are called biobanks.
"We do not envision this as being a biobank, which would suggest a single repository for all the data or all the samples," Jo Handelsman, associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told The Times.
"There are existing cohorts around the country that have already been started and have rich sources of data. The challenge in this initiative is to link them together and fill in the gaps," Handelsman explained.
The data collected in the new initiative would include laboratory test results, medical records, information about people's diet, lifestyle, environment and tobacco use, and profiles of patients' genes, The Times reported.
Patients will help shape the research program and their "privacy will be rigorously protected," according to Handelsman.
She noted that "patients with breast, lung and colorectal cancers routinely undergo molecular testing as part of their care," and doctors use the results of these tests to help them select treatments most likely to benefit patients.
The initiative was praised by Mark Fleury, a policy analyst at the American Cancer Society's Cancer Action Network.
"Cancer is a disease of faulty genes. The goal of personalized medicine is to understand the unique characteristics of individual patients so therapies can be tailored to genetic mutations that underlie their disease," he told The Times.
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