Hopes For Medical Advances Rise As Gene Sequencing Cost Falls

Hopes For Medical Advances Rise As Gene Sequencing Cost Falls

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In Silicon Valley, the line between computing and biology has begun to blur in a way that could have enormous consequences for human longevity. The promise is that low-cost gene sequencing will lead to a new era of personalized medicine, yielding new approaches for treating cancers and other serious diseases. The arrival of such cures has been glacial, however, although the human genome was originally sequenced more than a decade ago.

Now that is changing, in large part because of the same semiconductor industry manufacturing trends that opened up consumer devices like the PC and the smartphone: exponential increases in processing power and transistor density are accompanied by costs that fall at an accelerating rate. As a result, both new understanding and new medicines will arrive at a quickening pace, according to the biologists and computer scientists.