NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The University of Washington School of Medicine today announced the launch of the Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine (BBI), which is being funded with a $50 million gift from friends and family of recently deceased Costco Cofounder Jeff Brotman.
The BBI, which will be directed by UW Medicine's Jay Shendure, will establish a network of research labs across UW Medicine, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and Seattle Children's Hospital. Among the institute's first initiatives will be to catalog the roughly 60,000 estimated possible mutations of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes in order to identify those that confer the greatest risk of breast cancer and help patients make informed decisions about their health.
"A typical patient doesn't really exist, yet for more than a century, medicine has been focused on diagnosing and treating typical patients," Shendure said in a statement. "Precision medicine aims to use an individual patient's unique genetic code to more effectively diagnose and individually treat that person. Through both basic science and the translation of new advances to the clinic, the institute will accelerate this process."