President Obama will mark the start of a year-long precision medicine trial with a summit at the White House. 170 people are involved in the program, which aims to enroll 79,000 volunteer participants by the end of this year to supply personal data that will eventually be used to improve health and treat disease.

Precision medicine is a modern medical model that proposes the customization of healthcare – establishing different medical practices and tailoring the treatment for inididual patients.

Precision medicine (PM) is a medical model that proposes the customization of healthcare, with medical decisions, practices, and/or products being tailored to the individual patient. In this model, diagnostic testing is often employed for selecting appropriate and optimal therapies based on the context of a patient’s genetic content or other molecular or cellular analysis. Tools employed in PM can include molecular diagnostics, imaging, and analytics/software. Precision medicine does not literally mean the development of drugs or treatments unique to each individual, but rather to classify individuals into subpopulations based on their biological particularities and susceptibility to particular diseases.

In a briefing with reporters Thursday, NIH Director Francis S. Collins called the effort “the largest, most ambitious research project of this sort ever undertaken.” Responsibility for assembling the volunteers has been awarded to Vanderbilt University and advisers from Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences), Collins said. The NIH hopes to enroll 79,000 people this year.