Personal Genomics In Our Future
March 26 2008 / by Venessa Posavec
Category: Technology Year: 2011 Rating: 10
As genome sequencing costs continue to fall, the personal genomics industry may soon blossom. It could be as soon as next year. I’m hopeful for that, at least, after reading a post on Brian Wang’s blog, Next Big Future. He gave a nice succinct overview of what’s going on in the field, and how quickly it may become affordable for many people.
In order to really be viable as a supplemental health service, the magic price point for a full genome sequencing is said to be $1,000. Here’s a quick breakdown of how drastically the time and money needed to produce that data has been minimized already, thanks to the accelerating rate of computing power and technological progress:
If Intelligent Bio-Systems pulls this off at $5,000 this year, I would expect to be able to have my genome mapped by throwing down my $20 co-pay sometime very soon. Though the global gene sequencing market is set to reach $850 million by 2011, I don’t think we’ll see the industry really take off until we know how to use the information to our benefit.
Quantification is certainly the first step in understanding how our genes affect health and disease, and it will be interesting to know how susceptible I am to developing various diseases. The next step will be to tailor drugs and therapies to effectively combat them. I hope all the data that’s being collected will be open source and available to scientists worldwide for collaboration, perhaps through something like Google’s Palimpsest project.
Who will be the first to utilize this information to create cures?
(via Next Big Future)
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update: VisiGen plans to offer a $1000 test by 2009, with a 1 week sequence time. Bionanomatrix plans to offer a $100 test with an 8 hour sequence time (no year listed when this might be accomplished)
(via VentureBeat)
Posted by: Venessa Posavec March 27, 2008
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