Manson to serve on precision medicine panel

Spero Manson, distinguished professor and associate dean of research at the Colorado School of Public Health, has been selected to serve on a panel of experts that will steer President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative.

The $215 million initiative seeks to leverage genomics, informatics, and health information technology to accelerate biomedical discoveries and enable personalized medicine approaches for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Of the funding that Obama seeks in his FY 2016 budget, $130 million would go toward creating a national research cohort of about 1 million people, whose biological data, as well as environmental, lifestyle, and behavioral information, will be shared with qualified researchers.

Heading the panel are co-chairs Richard Lifton from the Yale University School of Medicine, Bray Patrick-Lake from Duke University, and Kathy Hudson, the deputy director of science, outreach, and policy at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The panel will seek input from stakeholders in the Precision Medicine Initiative and define the scope and scale of the initiative, the issues that need to be addressed, and what success would look like five and 10 years out, the NIH said. The panel will be formed as a working group of the Advisory Committee to the NIH director and will deliver a preliminary report in September that will inform efforts to explain the role that individual differences play in health.