Mayo Clinic will be awarded $142 million in funding over five years by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to serve as the national Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) Cohort Program biobank. The biobank will hold a research repository of biologic samples, known as biospecimens, for this longitudinal program that aims to enroll 1 million or more U.S. participants to better understand individual differences that contribute to health and disease to advance precision medicine.

Precision medicine is an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person.

The Precision Medicine Initiative was launched by President Barack Obama in 2015 “to bring us closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes, and to give all of us access to the personalized information we need to keep ourselves and our families healthier.” Data from biological samples combined with information from lifestyle and health questionnaires, medication history, electronic health records, physical exams, and environmental exposures and real time physiology tracked through digital technologies, will help researchers examine individual differences in health and disease.

“This range of information at the scale of 1 million people will be an unprecedented resource for researchers working to understand all the factors that influence health and disease,” says Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., NIH director. “The more we understand about individual differences, the better able we will be to tailor the prevention and treatment of illness.”

The Precision Medicine Cohort Program biobank will reflect the diversity of the U.S. population by including participants from diverse social, racial/ethnic, and ancestral populations living in a variety of geographies, social environments, and economic circumstances, and from all age groups and health statuses. The PMI Cohort Program biobank then will provide the infrastructure to store and curate more than 35 million biospecimens.

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