Obama’s precision medicine initiative

President Barack Obama announced a new precision medicine initiative in his State of the Union Address. Also known as personalized medicine, expanding the government’s focus on precision medicine, whether through additional investment or priority funding status, will have direct positive impact on the diagnostics industry by potentially broadening research and development efforts to identify new diagnostic markers and to expand use of emerging testing technologies, including sequencers. While details remain unknown at this time, experts are speculating that the initiative could make personalized medicine-related research a funding priority and could bolster the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to facilitate related research efforts.