[podcastmaker (OP)]

Where will genetic science be in five years?

[evan_au]

Reading Genes
The cost of DNA sequencing is dropping exponentially.

Having plummeted between 2007 and 2011, it is now again tracking roughly parallel with Moore's Law - but that is still a (negative) exponential decline in costs..

https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Sequencing-Human-Genome-cost

That is the raw cost of DNA sequencing; understanding what the DNA is saying is still difficult and expensive; when seeking the significance of the many unique mutations in any individual, the answer is often "nobody knows".

I am hoping that with the exponential decline in costs, there will be an exponential increase in the number of people being sequenced, which will lead to improved understanding of what many gene variants actually do.

We are only now starting to map the regulatory pathways in DNA, and this often has just as much impact on the individual's health as the DNA letters. A harmful genetic variant which is always turned off is no longer harmful (in that generation).

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlson_curve

Writing Genes
Since the discovery of CRISPR/CAS9, the ability to modify genes has improved dramatically.
- But it's still a bit like doing surgery with a chainsaw - you may modify the gene you expect, but you are also likely to do a lot of collateral damage in nearby regions of the genome.
- In the current state of play, you would only use CRISPR/CAS9 in organisms where you were prepared to have a lot of trials and errors - pharmaceutical-producing yeast, lab mice and agricultural animals and crops.
- Fears and laws currently ban or limit genetically-engineered organisms or products in many parts of the world

With improved versions of gene editing tools (there is a reason that CAS9 is numbered #9), it may be possible to do much more precise changes.
- In 5 years time, I expect that far more gene-modifying treatments will be available
- But it will need to get a lot better before people trust it with germ-line modification in humans.

Applications
SARS-COV-2 analysis was a triumph of genetic sequencing (RNA , in this case, rather than DNA)
- It is likely that the upcoming SARS-COV-2 vaccinations will be the first mass deployment of a genetically-engineered product in history

This will probably pave the way for further applications (if politicians don't rush unready products to market, greedy businesses don't deploy product which they know to be dangerous, religious leaders don't denounce it as an abomination, and social media thought leaders don't all suddenly become anti-vaxxers...).

In 5 years time, I expect that the state of genetic technologies will be roughly 5 times better than they are now.
- But whether public acceptance will be better or worse is anyone's guess!

[chris]

CRISPR, the gene editing technique, won the Nobel Prize this year; this is one indicator of the pace at which this field is advancing. I suspect that within 10 years we will be sequencing people routinely at birth; that might happen within the next 5 years, especially with Covid-19 stimulating an interest in the human genome...