UMass Medical School joins Obama's $5.5M precision partnership

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The University of Massachusetts Medical School has joined a $5.5-million phase of a White House program centered around personalized medicine.

The Worcester medical school last week was added into the White House’s Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program as part of the Trans-American Consortium for the Health Care Systems Research Network, a medical center group that also includes health and research organizations in Texas, Michigan and Minnesota. The Trans-American network was one of four regional medical center groups to join the initiative last week.

As part of the program, UMass Medical School will help implement a precision medicine program geared towards making disease prevention and treatment as personal as possible. The four regional medical center groups will receive initial funds of $5.5 million for recruitment and infrastructure and could receive up to $16 million in first-year funds as efforts advance.

According to the National Institute of Health, the program’s new medical center groups have expertise in engaging racial and ethnic minority populations that are historically underrepresented in biomedical research.

The goal of the Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program is to engage 1 million or more U.S. participants to begin research that will lead to disease treatment and prevention based on lifestyle, environmental and genetic differences, according to the NIH. It was launched by President Barack Obama in his 2015 State of the Union address.