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Genetic technology is expensive now, but that may change
Sunday, July 09, 2000 By Byron Spice, Science Editor, Post-Gazette
Everyday genetic testing sounds exciting, but will it be affordable?
New technologies such as DNA microarrays and other elaborate testing devices are slick, but for now they are quite expensive, costing hundreds or thousands of dollars apiece.
Wasyl Malyj, a molecular biologist at the University of California, Davis, maintains that Moore's Law eventually will apply to genetic testing. The law, named after former Intel chairman Gordon Moore, says that the capacity of computer microchips will double every 18 months or so. Moore's observation has held true, and that's one reason the speed and memory of computers keep growing, but not their prices.
Genetic testing costs so far have not followed Moore's Law, but Malyj maintains the field has the potential to achieve great improvements in performance. Malyj runs a lab where genetic profiling now costs just $24 per patient -- although in Malyj's case, the patients are quarterhorses and the profiling is meant to determine parentage, not a disease state.
"Finding out stuff about your own genome is not going to be prohibitively expensive," added Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. Part of his reasoning is that overall health system costs should decline because preventive care enhanced by genetic profiling will allow people to avoid or delay diseases that are expensive to treat.
But even Collins acknowledges that the payoff of preventive care is well down the road. Initially, costs are bound to rise as genetic testing increases and as people undergo the additional monitoring necessary to catch cancers early, find the first warning signs of heart disease or detect rare genetic disorders.
"The good old days of just adding on [and] adding on anything new came to an end years ago," said Dr. Joseph Scherger, chairman of family medicine at the University of California, Irvine. As new technologies are introduced, health plans will evaluate them and determine if they are cost effective.
"That's all just part of the equation now," Scherger said.
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