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The White House announced on Wednesday measures aimed at advancing President Barack Obama's precision medicine initiative, including plans to speed the development of tests used to identify genetic mutations and guide medical treatment. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it planned to issue a proposal on Wednesday to create performance standards to guide development of next generation sequencing (NGS) tests. These tests scan a person's DNA and identify genetic differences that could be responsible for a patient's symptoms. (Clarke, 7/6)

The Obama administration on Wednesday announced new steps in implementing its Precision Medicine Initiative, a research effort aiming to tailor disease prevention and treatment to a specific person’s characteristics. These steps include awarding $55 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health to develop the initiative’s experimental cohort program, a Food and Drug Administration proposal to make its oversight of genomic tests more efficient, and the development of tools to make the data that is collected accessible to researchers. (Owens, 7/6)