Developing affordable therapies based on the products of next-generation gene sequencing requires a lot more work on four main areas, says Amati Global Investors.
The four areas are cost, data, analysis and patient access, argues Dr Gareth Blades, an analyst on the fund management team.
“There is a vision emerging in the industry of having sequencing at every point in the healthcare continuum; from family planning through to disease recurrence testing.
“The unifying element of these applications is the growth of clinical testing, the most valuable part of the market,” he says in a note on genetic sequencing published on Thursday.
The note mentions some of the companies involved in the sub-sector, including US groups Illumina Inc (NASDAQ:ILMN), Pacific Biosciences of California Inc (NASDAQ:PACB) and Laboratory Corp. of America Holdings (NYSE:LH), London-listed Oxford Nanopore Technologies PLC (LSE:ONT) and private companies Element Biosciences and Ultima Genomics.
On costs, he notes that even cheaper sequencing is required, with $200 is still "prohibitively high for mass adoption if it is being truly democratised".
The data issue is more mind-boggling, with a single human genome sequence creating 200 gigabytes of data and estimates putting the amount of genomic data is generated each year is between 2bn and 40bn gigabytes.