NIH Announces Funding Opportunities for Precision Medicine Initiative

This week the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced the first set of funding opportunities for the precision medicine initiative, a project unveiled by President Obama back in February that will enroll 1 million volunteers in the next three to four years

The initiative’s aim, per President Barack Obama’s announcement earlier this year, is to pioneer a new model of patient-powered research to accelerate biomedical discoveries and provide clinicians with new tools, knowledge, and therapies to select which treatments will work best for which patients.

In August, the Food and Drug Administration announced plans to develop an open-source software platform, called precisionFDA, to share genomic information and support precision medicine.

In the announcement this week, NIH Director Francis Collins said the funding would help to build “a solid infrastructure for the PMI cohort program” including a coordinating center, biobank, network of healthcare provider organizations and participant mobile technologies.

NIH also announced a funding opportunity to develop a pilot program to inform the creation of the direct volunteer enrollment component of the cohort, as well as funding to develop a communication infrastructure.

According to Collins, NIH will begin building the precision medicine initiative infrastructure so enrollment in the cohort can begin in 2016.