Obama Announces First Pilot Projects for the One Million Patient Cohort for Precision Medicine Study

A year after announcing his Precision Medicine Initiative, President Barack Obama has outlined progress on the project, which aims to accelerate personalized medicine.

The president noted that more than 40 companies have come together to form a public-private partnership that will make it easier for patient data to be shared safely. The National Institutes of Health is helping to build a nationwide million-person cohort to study genomic differences across a diverse patient pool.

Genentech and Pfizer are among the drug companies that have committed to participating in pilot projects in data sharing, as has Google and universities and research institutes.