U.S. President Barack Obama wants to invest $215 million into a new health initiative that would help tailor medical treatment to an individual's genetic make-up.
President Obama will propose Friday the bulk of the money goes to the National Institutes of Health and its affiliate, the National Cancer Institute for the development of "precision medicine;" a treatment that would replace a "one size fits all" approach to medicine.
A White House Statement said "most medical treatments have been designed for the 'average patient'....as a result, treatments can be very successful for some patients, but not for others."
The funding would be used to collect gene, chemical, lifestyle and other data from one million volunteers who would be studied to determine how genetic variants affect health and disease.
But first, the initiative, which is part of the Democratic president's 2016 budget, must be approved by the Republican-controlled Congress.
Mr. Obama said in his recent State of the Union address that he wants "the country that eliminated polio and mapped the human genome to lead a new era of medicine."