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President Obama had one major challenge at his precision medicine summit on Thursday: avoid getting bogged down in jargon. Instead he kept his eyes on the horizon, focusing on the benefits he envisions 10 years from now if precision medicine moves forward: better, more effective medical treatments tailored to individuals, and eventually lower costs because there will be less spending on treatments that don’t work. (Nather, 2/25)

President Obama on Thursday waded into the complex and high-stakes debate over whether patients own their genetic information, saying that he believes that his tissues and any discoveries that stem from his DNA belong to him. “I would like to think that if somebody does a test on me or my genes, that that’s mine, but that’s not always how we define these issues,” Mr. Obama said during a White House forum on a major biomedical research initiative he began last year. The president said that the success of his Precision Medicine Initiative, which aims to collect genetic data on one million American volunteers so scientists can develop drugs and treatments tailored to individual patients, hinged at least in part on “understanding who owns the data.” (Hirschfeld Davis, 2/25)

The National Institutes of Health said on Thursday it hopes to enroll 79,000 volunteers by the end of 2016 toward what it hopes will be a one-million-patient “precision medicine” study of the genetic causes of diseases. The NIH and the White House launched the $215 million precision medicine initiative a year ago as an effort to find genetic patterns of cancer and other diseases. The centerpiece of that initiative is the one-million person cohort by the end of 2019, and the NIH said it has awarded an initial grant to Vanderbilt University to explore the best way to recruit volunteers for the study. (Burton, 2/25)

“For most of history, medicine has been based on trying to identify what works for the average person. We’re all different. This one-size-fits-all approach is far from optimal,” Dr. Francis Collins, NIH’s director, told reporters. The goal is to “empower any person, anywhere in the U.S., to raise their hand and volunteer to participate” in what’s called the PMI Cohort Program, he said. NIH said is it providing funding to Vanderbilt University for a pilot project to learn how best to attract those volunteers, how to collect the data, and what findings about their own health participants want in return. Vanderbilt will work in collaboration with advisers from Verily, formerly Google Life Sciences. (Neergaard, 2/25)