One year into the National Institutes of Health's Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI), the massive project could still benefit from incorporating experimental studies of animal models of human disease, according to Kent Lloyd and colleagues in this Editorial. The PMI hopes to prompt a new era of individualized medicine, where a person's own genetic profile along with personal environmental exposures and behaviors can be used to target therapies more effectively. The massive amounts of genetic and molecular data accrued from animal models to date, along with the procedures for curating, integrating, and mapping these data, could prove useful to researchers working on the PMI, Lloyd and colleagues write. Animal models offer an excellent opportunity to learn more about the impact of environmental exposures, or the widespread effects of genetic variants in relation to human diseases, they suggest.
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Science Translational Medicine