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.

Advances in DNA technology hold great promises and... threats

DNA sequencing technology has come a long way since the Human Genome Project (HGP) was completed in 2000. HGP was a decade-long international research effort that decoded the first human genome and cost a whopping $1 billion dollars. Today, anyone's DNA can be sequenced for a few thousand dollars, and this figure is expected to go down significantly in the next few years.


Cheap DNA sequencing holds great promises because, among other things, it will make personalized medicine possible. Based on a unique DNA sequence, scientists will be able to determine the molecular bases of a patient's condition and, consequently, design extremely efficient biotech drugs.

In fact, scientists are now able to "write" DNA from scratch. Using this technology, bacteria will be synthesized such that they produce patient-specific drugs.

Yet, as Vivek Wahwa points out in the Washington Post, these advances in genomics can also be used for nefarious ends. Bio-toxins intended to infect a certain person or a group of people could be nearly impossible to detect precisely because of their specificity.