When I first began writing on the internet genomics was an exciting field of science. Somewhat abstruse, but newly relevant and well known due to the completion of the draft of the human genome. Today it’s totally different. Genomics is ubiquitous. Instead of a novel field of science, it is transitioning into a personal technology.
But life comes at you fast. For all practical purposes the $1,000 genome is here.
And yet we haven’t seen a wholesale change in medicine. What happened? Obviously a major part of it is polygenicity of disease. Not to mention that a lot of illness will always have a random aspect. People who get back a “clean” genome and live a “healthy” life will still get cancer.
Another issue is a chicken & egg problem. When a large proportion of the population is sequenced and phenotyped we’ll probably discover actionable patterns. But until that moment the yield is going to not be too impressive.
Consider this piece in MIT Tech, DNA Testing Reveals the Chance of Bad News in Your Genes:
Out of 50 healthy adults [selected from a random 100] who had their genomes sequenced, 11—or 22 percent—discovered they had genetic variants in one of nearly 5,000 genes associated with rare inherited diseases. One surprise is that most of them had no symptoms at all. Two volunteers had genetic variants known to cause heart rhythm abnormalities, but their cardiology tests were normal.
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There’s another possible consequence of people having their genome sequenced. For participants enrolled in the study, health-care costs rose an average of $350 per person compared with a control group in the six months after they received their test results. The authors don’t know whether those costs were directly related to the sequencing, but Vassy says it’s reasonable to think people might schedule follow-up appointments or get more testing on the basis of their results.
Researchers worry about this problem of increased costs. It’s not a trivial problem, and one that medicine doesn’t have a response to, as patients often find a way to follow up on likely false positives. But it seems that this is a phase we’ll have to go through. I see no chance that a substantial proportion of the American population in the 2020s will not be sequenced.