Big gene bank to anchor precision medicine

China has been working closely on its national precision medicine initiative featuring a gene bank covering at least several million Chinese, said a top Chinese scientist.

Cao Xuetao, president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College and a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said the initiative would comprise a series of policies and measures that are set to come out soon.

The concept of precision medicine is centered on the prevention, diagnosis and treatment strategies that take individual variability into consideration with the help of advanced technologies like modern genetics, molecular imaging and bioinformatics.