Vice President Joe Biden’s announcement last year that he was launching a National Cancer Moonshot, funneling money and talent into a cure for cancer, sparked a lot of discussion in the research community. The question: What can be done to turn cancer into a manageable disease?

Cancer isn’t the only disease being looked at in a new light. President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative – backed with $200 million – calls for research into other diseases as well, including mental illness. It aims to find treatments suited for individuals, recognizing that treatment is no longer one-size-fits-all.

But how do you do that? And what else has to change to make a difference in patient outcomes? Here & Now’s Robin Young discusses this with Eric Lander, who is founding director of the Broad Institute, a biomedical and genomic research center recently recognized by President Obama for three projects that fall under the Precision Medicine Initiative.

Guest

• Eric Lander, geneticist, mathematician and teacher. He’s founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He’s also co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He tweets @eric_lander.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.