The University of Michigan School of Public Health in Ann Arbor is participating in the National Institutes of Health-funded Data and Research Support Center, a part of President Barack Obama's national Precision Medicine Initiative, according The Michigan Daily.
The initiative is dedicating $55 million to further research into precision medicine, which aims to treat patients based on factors unique to them, such as lifestyle and medical history. The initiative was launched in January 2015.
The University of Michigan School of Public Health is already gathering genetics data for research through the Michigan Genomics Initiative. It has collected genetic information from 32,000 patients.
The university's Michigan Genomics Initiative is one reasons NIH selected the university to participate in the federal initiative, said Goncalo Abecasis, chair of the biostatistics department and the Felix E. Moore Collegiate Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.