As we described in an a post last month, in the State of the Union the President announced a new “Precision Medicine Initiative” to foster the development and delivery of personalized treatments for illnesses such as cancer and diabetes.  The FY 2016 budget released by the President yesterday includes $215 million in funding to launch the Precision Medicine initiative.

The HHS FY 2016 “Budget in Brief” describes the Precision Medicine initiative as a “cross-Department initiative to focus on developing treatments, diagnostics, and prevention strategies tailored to the individual genetic characteristics of each patient.”

According to the HHS Budget in Brief, $200 million of the proposed funding would go to NIH “to launch a national research cohort of a million or more Americans who volunteer to share their genetic information, expand current cancer genomics research, and initiate new studies on how a tumor’s DNA can inform prognosis and treatment choices.”  In addition, $10 million would go to FDA “to modernize the regulatory framework to aid the development and use of molecular diagnostics in precision medicine,” and $5 million would go to ONC to “develop technology and define standards and certification criteria to enable the exchange of genomic data.”