Jo Handelsman: Precision
medicine is an exciting new
area of medicine that allows
us to use cutting-edge
technology to match patients
with the treatments that
will make them well.
Precision medicine gives us
the tools to say what makes
each of us different from
everyone else, and that's
a mixture of our genes,
the microbes that live
on us and in us, the
environments that we live
in, and all the factors in
the environment that
we're exposed to, as
well as our diets.
All of those things come
together to determine how
healthy or unhealthy we are
and the power of precision
medicine is beginning to
interpret what factors will
affect an individual's health
or susceptibility to disease.
We have technology now
that can sequence
the human genome
quite rapidly.
That means we can
get a sequence,
or the alphabet
that forms the gene,
for every single trait
in the human body.
Precision medicine is now.
We're already using it,
it's already affecting
people's lives, and
we now it works.
But if we can expand it to
cover lots of different disease
and health characteristics,
we will be able to treat
all sorts of diseases that
we have no idea how
to tackle right now.
So the future of precision
medicine is enormous.
This is a revolution
in medicine.
I am so excited to be here
at the White House working
on this initiative, because
I think this is one
of the biggest things to
happen in medicine in a very,
very long time, and will
really make the future
health of people in
America totally different.
