A project called LawSeqSm will bring legal, ethics and scientific experts from across the country together to analyze the current state of genomic law and establish guidance to facilitate the implementation of clear legal standards regarding the science in the future.
The three-year project is funded by a $2 million dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health. Recently launched federal initiatives are aimed at using genomics to accelerate the development of more powerful and precise treatments to combat cancer and other diseases. Yet both federal and state laws surrounding this area of science are murky and abstruse.
Francis S. Collins, MD, NIH director, and Harold Varmus, MD, director of the National Cancer Institute, previously wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine, "Achieving the goals of precision medicine will . . . require advancing the nation's regulatory frameworks."
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