Obama’s Precision Medical Initiative or Your Privacy?
United States President Barack Obama, along with major healthcare institutions in the US, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), are supporting a Precision Medicine Initiative. The Precision Medicine initiative is designed to help doctors personalize treatments to the individual characteristics of the patients or their disease by assessing the patient’s genes, environment and lifestyle. These advances in medicine can potentially improve the chances for more effective health care treatment with potentially fewer side effects. Although it will likely expand in the near future, Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative is currently targeting two prominent chronic diseases in the US: diabetes and cancer.
While Precision Medicine might sound like the best breakthrough to happen to healthcare since the discovery of penicillin, more precise medical treatment comes at a cost. Part of the long term goals of the project includes collecting genetic information from upwards of a million volunteers and would involve sharing their very health related personal information with the world. In obtaining this information, doctors hope to assess whether environmental factors like diet, exercise, smoking and alcohol consumption, in conjunction with an individual’s genetic makeup, place patients at a higher risk for contracting certain diseases. “Just like analyzing DNA teaches us more about who we are than ever before, analyzing data from one of the largest research populations ever assembled will teach us more about the connections between us than ever before,” said President Obama [1].
The fact that a number of major medical organizations such as the NIH and the FDA are supporting the Precision Medical Initiative has made some Americans less weary of the policy proposal. With celebrity faces to support the treatment, including retired basketball player and cancer patient Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and promises of improved technologies for biomedical analysis, there is a good deal of popular support for a future driven by Precision Medicine.
While the White House asserts that protecting privacy is of primary importance, there remain a number of legal, ethical and social concerns that will likely not be ameliorated over the course of the initiative.
