Gov. Brown To Launch New California Precision Medicine Initiative

On Tuesday, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) plans to launch the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine to improve personal health care and cut costs by applying targeted treatments, the San Francisco Business Times' "BiotechSF" reports.

Background

The initiative follows the announcement of President Obama's $215 million Precision Medicine Initiative, which would create a volunteer database of:

• Genetic information;
• Medical data; and
• Tissue samples.

In addition, Brown last year teased the California initiative in his State of the State address (Leuty, "BoitechSF," San Francisco Business Times, 4/14).

He said, "Just as California has led the way with stem cell research, so too can we pioneer the new field of precision medicine, which uses genomics, medical devices, computer sciences and other fields to treat individual patients, instead of broad populations" (California Healthline, 1/23/14).

Details of California Initiative

Overall, the initiative aims to provide targeted therapies and lower costs by improving the understanding of diseases and their treatments.

According to "BiotechSF," the program will launch Tuesday with an initial $3 million state investment. It will be led by the University of California and hosted at UC-San Francisco.

The initiative will use data from the UC health system, including five UC medical centers.

Specifically, the initiative will cross reference de-identified patient data with:

• Clinical trial data;
• Environmental information;
• Genomic data;
• Health patterns; and
• Mobile technologies.

The initiative will start with two pilot programs that have not yet been determined.

In addition, the initiative will review the state's current public and private precision medicine tools, according to Atul Butte, director of UCSF's Institute for Computational Health Sciences and clinical informatics director at UC Health.

Comments

Butte said, "We're building a Google Maps for health." He added that while the project is starting with "a modest amount of money," it is "just the beginning."

Meanwhile, Keith Yamamoto, vice president of research at UCSF, said, "The success of the California Precision Medicine Initiative depends upon finding ways to effectively collect and integrate diverse forms of data, from the very objective -- genomic and molecular -- to the more subjective -- environmental influences and life experiences" ("BoitechSF," San Francisco Business Times, 4/14).