The Legislative Analyst's Office is recommending the state reject Gov. Jerry Brown's proposal to add $10 million in funding under the 2016-17 state budget for his precision medicine initiative started last year.
The LAO said there are unanswered questions about how the added funding would be used, such as how many projects would be funded and at what cost.
Brown announced the new precision medicine initiative in April 2015, saying the aim is to "better understand disease through advanced computing and spur public-private collaboration throughout the state."
Last year's state budget set aside $3 million in startup funds to the Governor's Office of Planning and Research for the two-year California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine, which involves five University of California medical centers led by the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
The initiative planned demonstration projects, a data inventory, and creation of tools and applications. The demonstration projects being funded are the Kids Cancer Comparison Project, led by UC Santa Cruz, and the Precision Diagnosis of Acute Infectious Disease project, led by UC San Francisco.
"The $10 million augmentation will fund additional demonstration projects in precision medicine over a multi‑year period and facilitate additional multi‑institution and private‑sector partnerships, with a portion of this funding subject to nonstate matching funds," the governor's 2016-17 budget summary says.
The National Institutes of Health describe precision medicine as an "emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment and lifestyle for each person." Precision medicine is being used to fight some forms of cancer but has not been widely used to treat other diseases, the organization said.
President Obama announced a similar precision medicine initiative last year as part of his 2015-16 federal budget proposal.
