The Money of Sequencing

There has been an increasing number of cases in which people have been helped medically by knowing their genome, and Forbes' Matthew Herper adds that "these pioneers have followed a path we're all likely to trod down — and one that the business world has not even begun to figure out how to monetize." Herper goes on to say that while the price of DNA sequencing is falling quickly — he mentions the price war between Illumina and Life Tech as well as the influx of new approaches from PacBio, Complete Genomics, and others as driving that decline — it's uncertain if sequencing will be the commodity or the interpretation of those sequences. "Researchers are building a road we'll all walk on. At some point, somebody has to figure out where to put the tolls," he says.