Target Treatment Project Could Curb Health Costs: NIH Chief

Rising health-care costs could be tempered by the NIH’s million-person project to develop targeted treatments known as precision medicine, the head of the medical research agency said.

“With a million people as a national laboratory,” researchers can find out “what works and what doesn’t, what changes outcomes, what results in greater health, and what actually could save money,” Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said March 13. “This is a project that could yield an awful lot of results.”

Collins’s remarks before a health insurers’ industry conference come as the affordability of medical care and drug ...