With the State of the Union announcement of the $215 Million Precision Medicine Initiative, one of the most exciting aspects of the Initiative was the call for a national cohort for research and genomic sequencing.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) will be hosting a two-day workshop starting tomorrow, February 11th, of which Richard Weinshilboum, M.D., director of the Pharmacogenomics Program at the Center for Individualized Medicine, will be attending.

The NIH workshop will discuss the opportunities and challenges around building a large research cohort focused on precision medicine. There will be several leading experts from many disciplines and sectors, and the event will be webcast live both days.

Four working groups from many scientific disciplines and sectors were assembled in advance of the workshop to identify challenges and opportunities related to building a large research cohort and to outline concrete steps to meet these challenges. The working group members brought expertise in epidemiology, genomics, privacy, health information, and mobile technologies. These reports reflect the views of the authors and were designed to aid discussion at the NIH Workshop and do not represent official NIH findings.

Read the White Papers:

• Building a Consortium of Cohorts — Cohort Identification and Participant Recruitment (PDF - 193KB)
• Participant Engagement, Data Privacy, and Novel Ways of Returning Information to Participants (PDF - 152KB)
• Data Collection and Mobile Technologies (PDF - 481KB)
• Opportunities and Challenges Related to the Use of Electronic Health Records Data for Research (PDF - 184KB)

You can follow along online via the webcast here, and on Twitter with #PMINetwork.

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