President Obama has revealed more details about the Precision Medicine Initiative, an interagency project aimed at revolutionizing the way health care professionals treat certain diseases. The initiative, first announced in the State of the Union address, aims to harness recent medical discoveries and accelerate the transition from conventional "one-size-fits-all" medical treatments to personalized medicine, tailored to individual patient needs. The cornerstone of the initiative is a volunteer cohort of at least one million Americans who will provide researchers with data needed to make personalized treatments possible. The President's 2016 budget proposes funding the initiative to support the development of the volunteer cohort and address privacy concerns about collecting and sharing sensitive health data on such a large scale. The rest of the investment will go toward identifying genomic drivers in cancer for more effective cancer treatments, modernizing FDA's regulatory infrastructure, and developing an IT framework for secure exchange of health data. Whether Congress will fund the President's Precision Medicine Initiative and his other health care proposals will depend on the coming budget negotiations.

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