On January 20, 2015, President Obama launched a new U.S. initiative, the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI), to accelerate understanding of individual variability and its effect on disease onset, progression, prevention, and treatment. 

There are two components to the PMI, one focused on expanding current efforts in cancer genomics and testing methods for prevention and treatment of cancers in a more precise way; this component will be managed by the National Cancer Institute. The second is to create a large research cohort of one million or more participants who choose to share many types of data (e.g., biomedical, behavioral, and lifestyle) to advance research. The creation of this research cohort will provide unprecedented opportunities to discover and quantify factors that contribute to illness, and to test approaches that can preserve health and treat disease.

In the fiscal year 2016 budget, the President proposed that $215 million be devoted to the PMI. Of this, $130 million will be used to start building the PMI research cohort. To help plan for the creation and management of the PMI research cohort in fiscal year 2016 and beyond, a working group of the Advisory Committee to the NIH Director (ACD) will be established. This group includes experts from many disciplines and sectors.

The ACD Working Group on the Precision Medicine Initiative will develop a vision for how to harness the advances in technology, scientific understanding, and participant engagement to develop a platform for precision medicine research. 

To ensure that the Working Group's contributions can be incorporated into the funding plan for fiscal year 2016, in the short term, this group will develop a plan for creating and managing a large research cohort with data and specimens that can be accessed by all researchers for studies to understand the variables that contribute to health and disease and ultimately translate that knowledge into treatments tailored to individuals. A report will be delivered to the ACD in September 2015.