Investment analyst predicts explosive biotech growth

In a recent interview with The Life Sciences Report, a Casey Research analyst likened genetics to other twentieth-century technologies which remained in development for many years but eventually yielded consumer products that are now all but everywhere.

Just as the plasma TV (invented in the 1930s), the LED light (1960s), the industrial robot (also a child of the '60s), the touch-screen interface for computers (early 1980s) and other inventions we think of as thoroughly modern took decades to go from the lab into our everyday lives, it will take considerable time for genetic medicine to fully develop.

When it was first invented in the 1990s, he noted, genetic sequencing was prohibitively expensive and time-consuming, requiring billions of dollars and years to decode a single genome. Today, the same task can be completed in a day and for a few thousand dollars. This, he said, now makes possible the large-scale development and marketing of genetic medicine.