Provost named to national panel for Precision Medicine Initiative

Rice University Provost Marie Lynn Miranda has been invited by National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins to serve on an advisory panel for President Barack Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) Cohort Program.

Marie Lynn Miranda

The mission of the program, which Obama announced in this year’s State of the Union address, is to enable a new era of medicine through research, technology and policies empowering patients, researchers and providers to work together toward development of individualized treatments. According to the NIH, most medical treatments have been designed for the average patient, but the one-size-fits-all approach may not be successful for all patients. The field of precision medicine is expected to enable health care providers to tailor treatment and prevention strategies to people’s unique characteristics, including their genome sequence, the chemicals in their body, the composition of micro-organisms in their body, health history, lifestyle and diet.

To support the initiative, the NIH is building a national research cohort, or participant group, of at least 1 million volunteers that will provide the platform for expanding knowledge of precision medicine approaches.

Miranda is one of 12 experts who will provide ongoing guidance and oversight of the PMI Cohort Program and contribute to the evolution of the program’s vision, scientific and clinical goals, and operations. The panel will coordinate and integrate the program with activities of individual NIH centers and institutes and will review concepts for new initiatives and preliminary funding plan proposals.

“The Precision Medicine Initiative has the potential to take the very best scientific minds and the very best scientific approaches and deploy them in service to the most significant health problems that Americans and people internationally face,” Miranda said. “I truly believe it has the potential to change the way that we experience the world and how we live our lives. I am honored to serve on the PMI Advisory Panel.”

In addition to being the chief academic officer for Rice, Miranda is a professor of statistics. She specializes in research on environmental health, especially how the environment shapes health and well-being among children, and is a leader in the evolving field of geospatial health informatics. She is the founding director of the Children’s Environmental Health Initiative, a research, education and outreach program committed to fostering environments where all people can prosper.

Collins noted that the advisory panel is a “group of elite and visionary individuals to help guide this ambitious project.”

For more information on the PMI Cohort Program, visit https://www.nih.gov/precision-medicine-initiative-cohort-program.