Sequencing and Pharma

I almost went into the pharmaceutical industry. It was the hot thing when I was in high school, and the promise of finding new medicines every few years and helping people while making money was very attractive. Then I went to school, worked in labs/major pharma companies, and delved more into what was under the hood and discovered that it was more like playing roulette than chess. The name of the game was lets try just about everything, and hope that one hits. One billion dollars in investment money, countless potential candidates, maybe one that gets through. That was it in a nutshell. And for all of the guys that put up the money hoping to strike it rich, you had no idea what kind of return on investment you were going to get. If you were lucky, boom Amgen, if not, you got a drug that is applicable to maybe 100,000 people in the world...not all of whom have money and insurance to pay you back.

Fast forward a bit, and now the human genome has been entirely sequenced, and the cost of sequencing has gone down from millions to 10-20k. Not something the average Joe can afford, but more palatable for investors and research firms. Because of this the new fad is personalized medicine, and finding drugs and cures through sequencing. How do you do it you say?

Here's an example. Joe has cancer. He goes to his doctor and they sequence his DNA - once for normal tissue, and once for cancer tissue (FYI double the cost at least). Lab tech crunches the data and finds where the mutations are, and more techs come and discuss which ones may be affecting which pathways to cause the cancer. Drugs are then developed to suppress said genes, and the cancer is controlled. This is very ideal and many things can affect this though. #1 cancer constantly mutates/evolves, so once you control it, it may just mutate and render your old drugs useless. Then you get into the cycle of just testing/drug making/mutating. Sounds expensive.

What scientists are doing now is trying to some data mining. Basically sequence everything - every patient with every type of cancer with every type of background to be ready for whatever comes up. Huge gaps right now though are testing (doh!), and the fact that they really have no idea if the cancer will mutate in predictable ways depending on what drug you use to fight it.

All in all, nice concept - we will have to see how it shakes out, but seems too ideal and expensive (aka not practical). It is though one of the best options for fighting cancer