The USA has proposed analyzing genetic information from more than 1 million American volunteers to understand that disease and develop medicines targeted to an individual's genetic make-up.

The initiative, announced by the USA president Barack Obama, can include people - healthy and ill, men and women, old and young.

Officials hope genetic data from several hundred thousand participants in ongoing genetic studies would be used and other volunteers recruited to reach the 1 million total.

"Precision medicine gives us one of the greatest opportunities for new medical breakthroughs we've ever seen," Obama said, promising that it would "lay a foundation for a new era of life-saving discoveries."

The goal of the initiative is to create more and better treatments for cancer, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), said, adding that more work is needed in this sphere, Reuters reports.

The president proposed $215 million in his 2016 budget for the initiative. Of that, $130 million would go to the NIH to fund the research cohort and $70 million to NIH's National Cancer Institute to intensify efforts to identify molecular drivers of cancer and apply that knowledge to drug development.

A further $10 million would go to the Food and Drug Administration to develop databases; $5 million would go to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to develop privacy standards and ensure the secure exchange of data.