President Barack Obama recently announced his administration’s Precision Medicine Initiative, a proposal included in the President’s Fiscal Year 2016 budget that will include $215 million for research efforts to accelerate biomedical discoveries.

“The Precision Medicine Initiative could reinvigorate our nation’s leadership in biomedical research and provide clinicians with important new tools and therapies that work best for specific patients,” said ASCO Chief Medical Officer Richard L. Schilsky, MD, FACP, FASCO, who attended the White House announcement. “Funding for the National Institutes of Health [NIH] has remained stagnant and has fallen by 25% in real dollars over the past decade. We commend President Obama for recognizing the urgent need for renewing our nation’s support for research that helps our patients now and in the future.”

The plans outlined in President Obama’s proposal have the potential to advance care for patients with cancer. According to a White House fact sheet, objectives of the initiative include more and better treatments for cancer; the creation of a national, patient-powered research cohort of 1 million or more Americans who volunteer to participate in research; commitment to protecting privacy through a multi-stakeholder process with the Department of Health and Human Services and other federal agencies to identify and address issues related to privacy and security of data in the context of precision medicine; regulatory modernization; and public-private partnerships to develop the infrastructure needed to expand cancer genomics.