When Will Genomic Medicine Become As Common As Antibiotics?

I’m completely and utterly fascinated by the work that so many companies are doing with genomic medicine. I think that’s a good thing since I believe genomic medicine is just now starting to make its way into mainstream medicine. Plus, over the next couple years, genomic medicine is going to be a huge part of what every doctor does in healthcare. Maybe it won’t be as common as the antibiotic (what is?), but it will be extremely important to healthcare.

With that in mind, I’ve been devouring this whitepaper on the evolving promise of genomic medicine. It offers such a great overview of what’s happening with genomic medicine.

For example, they offer a great list of reasons why genomic medicine has become so important today: descreased cost of sequencing, speed of sequencing, availability of genomic tests, ways the genome can be used, reimbursement by payors, etc. That’s such a powerful cocktail of improvements. Does anyone doubt that widespread genomic medicine is near?

I also love how the whitepaper highlights the three pillars of genomic medicine: sequencing, translational medicine and personalized healthcare. That provides a great framework for starting to understand what’s happening with genomic medicine. Plus, the whitepaper offers these place where we’re seeing real benefits in healthcare: prediction of drug response, diagnosis of disease, and identification of targeted therapies. While much of this is still being tested, I’m excited by its progress.

I still have a lot to learn about genomic medicine, but the evolving promise of genomic medicine whitepaper has me even more interested in what’s happening. I’d be interested to hear what companies you think are most interesting in the genomic medicine space.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • I think Genomic medicine is made to be a panacea that we are searching for and its incredible how much money has been funneled into this already. Apart from sequencing, the the promise of genomic tests and their ability to narrowly predict disease has fallen short. Somewhat related is the fad of pouring money into anything to do with disease biomarkers without realizing that is like looking for micro needles in hay stacks.

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