Eric Dishman Named Director of Precision Medicine Cohort Program

By Bio-IT World Staff

April 12, 2016 | The National Institutes of Health have named Eric Dishman as Director of the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) Cohort Program.  Dishman will lead NIH’s effort to build the PMI landmark longitudinal research study of one million or more U.S. volunteers to expand our ability to improve health and treat disease through precision medicine.

Last September Dishman joked that he, “liked ‘personal’ medicine better, but I’ll use ‘precision’ to be part of the hype.” Then, speaking at the 2015 Converged IT Summit as Intel’s Vice President and Fellow of Intel Corporation’s Health & Life Sciences Group, Dishman argued that healthcare today practices “imprecision medicine” or “trial-and-error” at best.

As part of Intel’s “all in a day” vision of the future of diagnostics, Dishman proposed taking patients from diagnosis based on ‘omics, clinical and environmental data to a targeted treatment plan in one day.

Since September, Dishman has been working out his plan as a member of NIH’s PMI Working Group that deliberated intensively for several months last year to develop the design for the PMI Cohort Program. NIH director Francis Collins said, “Eric comes to NIH with a deep understanding of the initiative having played a critical role as a member of the PMI Working Group.”

Collins also noted Dishman’s track record of innovation at Intel, and his personal patient experience as a survivor of a rare form of kidney cancer.

“These experiences and perspectives are crucial to the PMI Cohort Program, which, in addition to advancing health and improving treatments for disease, will also pioneer a new model of research in which participants will be partners in the research process and actively engaged and informed,” Collins said.