We're going to conquer the scourges of mankind and shift medicine away from the hospital. We'll be fixing things at the molecular level. We'll fix the genes and the problems will go away. Fantastic stuff, even if those scenarios are such a long way off at this point as to be speculative. However, we may not see the earliest applications outside research institutions for at least five years, he predicts.
Cost is one inhibitor.
Still, genetic chips are expensive. Many states reportedly won't even pay for broad screening by other, far less expensive means. That explains why Dr. Guttmacher believes the demand is not there yet to pull chip technology into common use in the lab. Little by little, you'll see applications coming out of different labs over time. Even when scientists know where a patient's problem lies on a gene, for example, they may not be able to figure out just what mischief a certain single nucleotide polymorphism, or genetic variance, is causing at the cell level.