In his State of the Union address in January 2015, President Barack Obama announced the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI), an effort to gain better insights into the biological, environmental, and behavioral influences on diseases, such as cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, that have thus far eluded a proven means of prevention or treatment. As part of this initiative, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will build a national cohort, with a biobank, secure data sets, and computer networks. VA has signed an interagency agreement with the NIH, and will invite veteran volunteers to enroll in the PMI cohort as well. Likewise, the MVP is playing an important role in the National Cancer Moonshot initiative, introduced by Vice President Joe Biden in early 2016. Precision medicine’s greatest promise may be its potential to transform the way cancer is prevented, diagnosed, and treated. Nearly a third of the MVP enrollees have reported a cancer diagnosis, offering researchers a resource for exploration and analysis.
To help in these analyses, said Muralidhar, VA has signed an agreement with the Department of Energy to make use of the expertise and large supercomputing capacity and computing expertise at several of the agency’s national laboratories, including Oak Ridge, Sandia, Livermore, Los Alamos, and Argonne. “This will allow us to conduct data analysis at a scale that is currently not possible within the VA, and it will also allow us to make the cohort data more broadly available to larger numbers of researchers in the country, across federal agencies and universities.”
Since President Barack Obama launched the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) in January 2015, the administration has made significant progress in advancing its goals of ushering in a new era of medicine that delivers the right treatment at the right time to the right person. The development of the infrastructure and informatics necessary to make MVP work have helped pave the way for programs like PMI. VA photo/Robert Turtil
The ultimate goal of the MVP and PMI, of course, will be to take what’s learned from these large-scale genomic studies and use that knowledge to optimize treatments for diseases – or to prevent them entirely. It’s possible that the practice of medicine could be completely different in the span of a decade or two, and it will all have been made possible, Muralidhar said, by the altruism and patriotism of American veterans who paved the way by volunteering for the MVP.
“They’ve served their country once,” she said. “And they look at this as a second opportunity to serve.” When the MVP launched its focus groups and sent out early rounds of surveys to gauge the interest of veterans, more than 70 percent said they would participate. “If you visit our website (www.research.va.gov/mvp), you’ll see quotes by many of the veterans about why they’ve chosen to participate and serve again. It’s heartwarming to see their willingness to volunteer – for the benefit of not only their brothers and sisters, but of our entire nation.”
This article first appeared in Veterans Affairs & Military Medicine Outlook magazine.