NIH convenes Precision Medicine meeting

National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins convened a workshop on Wednesday to discuss President Obama's proposed Precision Medicine Initiative. The project is attempting to recruit 1 million volunteers to provide patient data for research.

Meeting participants included government officials, academics, leaders from pharma and data companies, and patient privacy advocates. Collins spelled out a broad vision of connecting existing patient cohort data to that of new participant volunteers, potentially including genotypic and phenotypic information, electronic health records, and data from customized wearable devices and smartphone apps, accessible via cloud-based storage. ...