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Obama proposes to fund tailored medical research

Initiative could receive support of both parties

WASHINGTON — President Obama will seek hundreds of millions of dollars for a new initiative to develop medical treatments tailored to genetic and other characteristics of individual patients, administration officials say.

The proposal, mentioned briefly in his State of the Union address, will be described in greater detail in his budget in the coming weeks. The effort is likely to receive support from members of both parties, lawmakers said.

“This is an incredible area of promise,” said Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, a gastroenterologist. “There will be bipartisan support.”

Obama called it precision medicine, but the terms “personalized medicine” and “individualized medicine” are also used to describe the evolving field in which, for example, a doctor prescribes a medication that targets a specific mutation in a patient’s genes.

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The money would support biomedical research at the National Institutes of Health and the regulation of diagnostic tests by the Food and Drug Administration, officials at the two agencies said.

The tests analyze the DNA in normal or diseased tissue. Doctors use that information to identify patients with cancer or other diseases who are most likely to benefit from a particular treatment — and those who would be harmed or not respond at all.

“In some patients with cystic fibrosis, this approach has reversed a disease once thought unstoppable,” Obama said in his address to Congress last week.

The gene responsible for cystic fibrosis was discovered by a team that included Dr. Francis S. Collins, who is now director of the National Institutes of Health and an architect of the new initiative. The FDA has approved a drug for patients with a genetic mutation responsible for some cases of the disease.

A patient taking that drug, William Elder Jr., a 27-year-old medical student in Ohio, was a guest of Michelle Obama at the State of the Union speech.

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Representative Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and Representative Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado, who is on the committee, welcomed Obama’s proposal. After holding hearings and round-table discussions last year, they said they were drafting a bill to encourage biomedical innovations.

As a senator in 2006 and 2007, Obama offered a bill to do just that — the Genomics and Personalized Medicine Act. Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina, was a cosponsor of the 2007 bill.

“Most medical treatments have been designed for the average patient,” said Jo Handelsman, associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “In too many cases, this one-size-fits-all approach is not effective.”

Dr. Ralph Snyderman, a former chancellor for health affairs at Duke University, said he was excited by Obama’s initiative. “Personalized medicine has the potential to transform our health care system, which consumes almost $3 trillion a year, 80 percent of it for preventable diseases,” he said.