In his 2015 State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama announced the launching of a “Precision Medicine Initiative”. The website hosting the White House Blog states, “The President’s 2016 budget includes investments in an emerging field of medicine that takes into account individual differences in people’s genes, microbiomes, environments, and lifestyles—making possible more effective, targeted treatments for diseases like cancer and diabetes” [1]. Subsequent to the address, Drs. Francis S. Collins and Harold Varmus [2] wrote an editorial enthusiastically supporting the initiative.Precision medicine is conceptually identical to the paradigm of “personalized medicine”. This emerging paradigm is focused on diagnostic testing, and how such testing can enable customization of medical therapies and interventions based on the unique molecular and biological characteristics of an individual patient. Currently, most efforts in the personalized medicine arena are focused on gene variant ...