In his 2015 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama announced the launch of the Precision Medicine Initiative, a new research effort to revolutionize how we improve health and treat disease.
“Doctors have always recognized that every patient is unique, and doctors have always tried to tailor their treatments as best they can to individuals,” the president said. “You can match a blood transfusion to a blood type — that was an important discovery. What if matching a cancer cure to our genetic code was just as easy, just as standard?”
President Obama Speaks on the Precision Medicine Initiative
Cathy Wu, the Unidel Edward G. Jefferson Chair of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Delaware, has devoted her career to improving how new scientific data generated by the scientific community is stored, organized, indexed, viewed, and analyzed.
She’s especially intrigued by proteins, which are important players in biological processes and may be the key that opens the precision medicine door.
Wu recently received two major grants to support this work.
The first is a $2.8 million renewal grant from theNational Institutes of Health (NIH) to further develop the Protein Ontology (PRO), a virtual reference library for proteins developed by Wu and her colleagues.
The NIH PRO grant will allow researchers to capture and accurately represent scientific knowledge for ontology mapping — the process of finding connections between concepts — and semantic integration of gene-disease-drug information.
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In his 2015 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama announced the launch of the Precision Medicine Initiative, a new research effort to revolutionize how we improve health and treat disease.
