Speaking at the White House on Jan. 30, President Obama urged support for a section in his budget proposal that would fund research in the field of "precision" or "personal" medicine. Here are highlights from that speech.

President Obama, in announcing an ambitious plan on Friday to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in cutting-edge biomedical research for treatments tailored to the genetic makeup of individual patients, said the effort would lay the foundation for a new generation of lifesaving discoveries.

In recent years, targeted therapies have led to more effective treatments for various cancers and other diseases, such as cystic fibrosis. The Food and Drug Administration has approved a growing number of specialized drugs for patients with specific genetic mutations, and the biotech industry has many more drugs in development.

The trend has benefited from sharp declines in the cost of genome sequencing. Decoding one persons genome, which used to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, costs about $1,000. Storing massive amounts of data is cheaper than ever, and the world is increasingly connected by mobile technologies and electronic medical records.

Lawmakers from both parties have embraced the broad idea of speeding up medical innovation, even if the details about how best to do that remain unresolved.

The really good news this is how you know that the moment is right is theres bipartisan support for the idea here in Washington, Obama said in the East Room on Friday morning, drawing a laugh from the crowd of renowned researchers, rare disease patients and officials from the biotech industry. Which makes me very happy.

Obama said he hopes to tap that bipartisan support and ask Congress for a $215 million for research on precision medicine. The request will be part of his annual budget scheduled for release Monday.

Still, for all its promise, the potentially staggering cost of some of the targeted drugs that have this kind of research has raised concerns.

Kalydeco, a drug approved in 2012 and highlighted by Obama on Friday, has done wonders for about 4 percent of cystic fibrosis patients with a specific genetic mutation. But it carries a price tag of about $300,000 a year.

We want to be sure that when these drugs come to market, they arent priced at a level people cant afford, said John Rother, president of the National Coalition on Health Care, which represents insurers, employers and consumer and religious groups, among others. Thats not the kind of world we want to live in.

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Obama seeks $215 million for personalized medicine effort

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