Seeded with a $2.5 million grant from the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development and matching funds from UNLV, the institute will decode people’s genomes to predict individual susceptibility to disease, study treatment options and fine-tune drug dosages to minimize adverse effects, Executive Director Martin Schiller said.

Looking at a graph of human life expectancy over the past four millennia, you get how far medicine has come from diagnosing witchcraft and prescribing bloodletting. But it’s still so inexact that for every year we live, we gain about two months of life. That’s how fast research is improving health care, says Martin Schiller, adding: “It’s maybe the best buy in history for return on investment.”