By Jeff Brown
This post The One Technology That Will Rewrite Medicine appeared first on Daily Reckoning.
Grace Wilsey couldn’t cry.
As a baby, she would lie limp in her parents’ arms, staring blankly into the distance. Her seizures wouldn’t stop and medical tests showed signs of liver damage. This was all before her second birthday.
Grace’s parents were beside themselves, as any parent would be. They traveled the country visiting specialists. They ran numerous tests, but no one could diagnose Grace’s condition.
“We’ve probably seen over 100 doctors,” Grace’s father said in 2014 when Grace’s symptoms were discovered.
None of them could provide an explanation.
Then, when their daughter turned two years old, the Wilseys tried something else. They had Grace’s entire genome sequenced.
A genome is an organism’s complete set of DNA, including all of its genes. “Genome sequencing” is the process of determining the complete DNA sequence. Think of it like creating a “genetic roadmap,” a complete blueprint of an organism’s genetic material.
What the genetic sequencing uncovered was astounding.
Grace Wilsey had a condition known as NGLY1 Deficiency. In short, the little girl’s NGLY1 genes were mutated. They were like typos in her genetic makeup.
One of the gene mutations prevented the little girl from producing tears. At the time, the disorder was so rare that only six people in the entire world had been diagnosed with it.
Now that the underlying cause is well understood, no time is wasted. Specific therapies can be developed to deal with this unusual genetic mutation.
The story I told you above is just one of millions. It is estimated that some 280 million people suffer from a rare genetic disease. Many of them often live their lives undiagnosed.
But there is hope on the horizon. The method used by the Wilsey family, genome sequencing, is experiencing exponential growth.
The cost of sequencing a human genome has plummeted. The speed of the sequencing technology has grown exponentially. And thanks to breakthroughs in genetic editing technology, we are on the verge of a complete transformation in medical care.
Soon, we’ll be able to identify genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia years before symptoms present themselves. Millions of lives will be saved. Hundreds of billions of dollars typically spent on chronic medical care will be eliminated.
And investors in a few key companies at the heart of this revolution stand to profit immensely.
The story of how rapid the improvements in genomic sequencing have been is one of the greatest examples of exponential growth, and exponential reduction in costs, in the history of technology.
One simple chart from the National Human Genome Research Institute explains it all. We can see the progression in reducing the cost of sequencing a human genome from $100 million in 2001 all the way down to less than $1,000 in 2016.
Overall, this progression is far faster than that of Moore’s Law, which accurately predicted that the processing power of microprocessors (semiconductors) would roughly double every two years.
From 2001 to 2007, the speed and reduction in costs of genetic sequencing had …read more
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