Everyone agrees that sequencing the whole human genome, which
was a bottleneck a decade back, is no longer the “rate limiting” step in our endeavor
to realize the ultimate goal of ‘personalized medicine’. The main hurdle to
achieve the true potential of our genome is to unlock the secret by powerful
analysis tools. In other words, the next decade may well be the decade of
bioinformatics/bio-IT. Having said that, there is a school of thought that paints
an alarming scenario. It envisions that genome interpretation would be very
costly and might take the possibility of personalized medicine a bit farther
from reality. However, skeptics argue that this is an alarmist viewpoint and
this might not be the reality.
The truth, according to me, lies somewhere in between. Yes,
there is a huge potential and a gap in understanding of the genome. In the
last few months, dozen start-ups have come up that are looking
to exploit this space. So, venture capitalists need to be assured that their
investment is in the right domain and would reap benefits in the long run. So,
part of this $1M interpretation theme might come from analyzing the future of
Bio-IT space. At the same time, a lot of the processes might get automated and
streamlined, hence the true figure might come to a much more manageable level. Like any
industry, many of the start-ups would fold up if their software do not come
to the real expectation of the key stake holders, and I mean not only the
bio-IT folks but physicians, geneticists, care givers and ultimately the
patients.
Also there is another point that I would like to make – for proper
analysis and interpretation, we need proper data, now since the genome
sequencing cost is coming down, many clinical trials or even basic research can enroll
a high number of subjects. This would ultimately help fine tune the analytical
ability of the software to predict diseases or treatment outcomes in a more
professional and authoritative way. This would lead to less cluttering of the
Bio-IT space with better and authentic Bio-IT tools.
Ultimately, the “final frontier” of personalized medicine is
not only about the hardware and the software looking for answers
in isolation but a conjoined effort to understand the human genome.
