Macrogen USA (now Psomagen), one of the leading providers of next-generation sequencing services, has been announced as a participating provider in precisionFDA. The precisionFDA web platform is part of President Obama’s vision with his Precision Medical Initiative announced last year. The administration’s goal is to move away from a “one-size-fits-all” approach to medicine and move towards a personalized medicine approach that takes into account differences in people’s genes, environments, and lifestyles.
The precisionFDA web platform is a community research and development portal that allows for piloting, testing, and validating bioinformatics approaches to NGS processing. It’s a platform that encourages collaboration and will allow scientists from business, academia, government, and other organizations to come together to conduct research that will further NGS research to improve patient treatment. Tools in the precisionFDA platform will include reference genomes and the ability to compare results to previously validated reference results. The platform will also include community challenges that provide guidelines and recognition for teams conducting research into areas of critical importance as identified by the Food and Drug Administration. By cloud-sourcing research and encouraging collaboration, the FDA hopes that precisionFDA will help knock down some of the barriers potentially preventing the advancement of certain research initiatives.
This initiative was built on the experiences learned from openFDA, which was launched in 2014. The openFDA project created multiple ways to use, integrate, and analyze FDA safety information, and the community approach seemed to help move along the initiative.
Macrogen USA is on the highly prestigious list of community participants on the precisionFDA platform. Other participants include the U.S. House of Representatives, Roche, the Garvan Institute, American Heart Association, Intel Corporation, National Institute of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Macrogen’s extensive involvement with precisionFDA continues to show its leadership in the Next Generation Sequencing field.
