The NIH is financially supporting precision medicine research for health disparities. | Courtesy of Shutterstock
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Amanda Rupp | Aug 2, 2016

NIH finances precision medicine research for health disparities

The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) recently promised approximately $31 million to researching health disparities.

The funds, which depend on available funding and will last for the next five years, will be dedicated to launching a new Transdisciplinary Collaborative Centers (TCCs) program specifically for researching health disparities.

The goal is to detect precision medicine that will encourage health equity across the U.S. Another goal is to further the science that is working to resolve health disparities and minority health concerns.

The new initiative will include developments for tools and analytic methods for patient data, pharmacogenomics and similar precision medicine tools for finding biomarkers, and more.

The new program is part of President Barack Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI). This initiative upholds the PMI Cohort Program, a national project to improve longitudinal research from one million U.S. scientists.

“The core values of the president’s PMI challenge the scientific community to advance population health in ways that create true benefits to all populations,” Dr. Eliseo Pérez-Stable, director of the NIMHD, said. “Precision medicine research endeavors must go beyond biologic and clinical markers and include social determinants of health, such as the economic, social and political conditions that influence health status. Ultimately, the TCCs will generate new knowledge about precision medicine that resonates from the community level to the national population level.”

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