NIH Director Francis Collins awarded Leadership in Personalized Medicine Award

FRANCIS COLLINS, director of the NIH, was awarded the Leadership in Personalized Medicine Award by the Personalized Medicine Coalition. He will be presented the award during the Personalized Medicine Conference at Harvard Medical School Nov. 19.

In his letter nominating Collins for the award, Harvard Medical School professor Raju Kucherlapati, noted that Collins “has made sustained and critical contributions for the establishment of personalized medicine.”

Collins earned national recognition in 1989, more than a decade before the complete sequencing of the human genome, for his team’s discovery of the gene responsible for cystic fibrosis. He then served as the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, where he was the overall project manager of the international Human Genome Project, which produced a complete map of the human genome in 2003.

He also played a key role in the passage of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act in 2008, which has helped to ensure that the insights from his extraordinary achievements and those of many others are not used for discriminatory purposes.

President Barack Obama nominated him as NIH director in 2009, proclaiming that his work had already “changed the very ways we consider our health and examine disease.” As director, Collins’ advocacy helped shape the Precision Medicine Initiative, which was announced earlier this year as part of the president’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2016.

“I see a day in the not too distant future when every person will have his or her genome sequenced and other important data collected as a routine part of medical care with individualized strategies developed for diagnosing, treating and preventing their disease,” said Collins. “I know that the PMC shares this vision and I am truly honored to receive this award from an organization that continues to pursue the vision with such great passion.”