WASHINGTON, D.C.: The United States has proposed analyzing the genetic information of more than 1 million American volunteers as part of a new initiative to understand human disease and develop medicines targeted to an individual’s genetic make-up.
At the heart of the initiative is the creation of a pool of people – healthy and ill, men and women, old and young – who would be studied to learn how genetic variants affect health and disease.
Officials hope genetic data from several hundred thousand participants in ongoing genetic studies would be used, and other volunteers recruited to reach the 1 million total.
Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) said the near-term goal of the initiative was to create more and better treatments…