The summit highlighted progress made in the past year to advance precision medicine, an approach that tailors disease treatment based upon individual differences in one's genes, environment and lifestyle.
During the summit, President Barack Obama participated in a live panel discussion, where he applauded the efforts of 40 private sector groups - including the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation - that launched innovative, precision medicine programs. In advance of the event, the White House issued a fact sheet featuring the foundation as a PMI "commitment maker" for the foundation's Patient Journey Initiative, a national education program that will help to identify critical steps in the patient journey, as a result of informed findings from an in-depth quantitative survey.
“We applaud the efforts of the NIH and the White House in strategically identifying the importance of precision medicine to find cures. At the MMRF, we firmly believe that precision medicine will change how patients are treated and cured and we've made precision medicine our top priority. We are committed to working collaboratively and across all sectors to help advance the national Precision Medicine Initiative,” said Giusti, who lives with multiple myeloma, a rare and fatal blood cancer.
Last year, following Obama’s announcement of the PMI during his 2015 State of the Union, Giusti was one of only two patients named to the Precision Medicine Initiative Working Group, as a result of having led the foundation in building its Precision Medicine Model, the only end-to-end system in cancer research today, and one that has led to the approval of 10 drugs to treat myeloma in the last decade.
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