Advancing precision medicine by enabling a collaborative informatics community

FDA plays an integral role in President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative, which foresees the day when an individual’s medical care will be tailored in part based on their unique characteristics and genetic make-up. Yet while more than 80 million genetic variants have been found in the human genome, we don’t understand the role that most of these variants play in health or disease. Achieving the President’s vision requires working collaboratively to ensure the accuracy of genetic tests in detecting and interpreting genetic variants. The FDA is working towards that goal by developing an informatics community and supporting platform they call precisionFDA. To begin to realize this new vision, precisionFDA is designed as a crowd-sourced, cloud-based platform to advance the science needed to develop the necessary standards. PrecisionFDA will supply an environment where the community can test, pilot, and validate new approaches. Planned for beta release (work in progress) in December 2015, precisionFDA will offer community members access to secure and independent work areas where, at their discretion, their software code or data can either be kept private, or shared with the owner’s choice of collaborators, FDA, or the public.