That's pretty impressive, but just wait: within the year, next-generation sequencing will make it commercially viable to sequence thousands of genes at once; and a year or two after that it will be more cost-effective to just sequence the entire genome and be done with it, effectively maxing out the curve at the level of "every disease for which the causative genes are known". After that, the rate of growth in the curve will be determined by the rate at which new disease genes can be discovered and characterised.
You can see that the number of testing laboratories is already plateauing - it will be interesting to see how quickly this declines over the next few years as large sequencing-based companies either engulf the boutique specialist laboratories or drive them out of business. There are ruthless economies of scale in the human disease genomics business, both in terms of sequencing infrastructure and the costs of assembling reliable knowledge bases for interpretation, so it will be increasingly difficult for smaller companies to stay competitive.
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1 comments:
I have to agree with your impression that there is not growth in the number of labs that is commensurate with an increase in genetic tests. Most of the big boys are gobbling up the smaller labs.
One component that tends to underestimate the number of small labs is the fact that they don't want to draw attention to their operations, by registering with GeneTests, as it is an open advertisement that they are providing testing services for diseases that are patented. Royalty enforcement on small labs is becoming a large burden of their meager existences.
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