I don't know. $100,000 to find a great treatment for one cancer, which previously had no treatment, seems cheap!
And I think a truck full of hard drives hurdling down the highway has had greater bandwidth than most of the world's networking for a while now.
As the future of medicine is clearly personalized I think the costs associates with genome sequencing and other analysis will come down. Or, at least, I hope they do.
Just to be clear, this $100,000 was spent to possibly identify a potential treatment for one person's cancer, not one type of cancer in general.
In other words, this was a $100,000 diagnostic test with no guarantee that an actionable diagnosis would result. By that, I mean that the results of the sequencing analysis either (a) might not pinpoint a driver mutation or (b) might pinpoint a driver mutation that does not have an efficacious drug available to act on that mutation. Also, all caveats about tumor heterogeneity and evolution, etc., apply.
An integrating sequencing approach involving the analysis of normal and cancerous cells to identify actionable mutations is the best we have for now, but it is still a hugely expensive, time-consuming, and technically-challenging process with an enormous failure rate associated with it. Nonetheless, I think it's terrific that, in this instance, it yielded valuable and actionable information that resulted in a meaningful clinical result. One step at a time!
And I think a truck full of hard drives hurdling down the highway has had greater bandwidth than most of the world's networking for a while now.
As the future of medicine is clearly personalized I think the costs associates with genome sequencing and other analysis will come down. Or, at least, I hope they do.