Thank you for both questions. I certainly can answer the first in more detail and with more comfort based on my level of knowledge. I'll speak briefly to the second. I'm not someone who prescribes biologics personally or uses those drugs.
When we think about personalized medicine, whether it's for rare disease or for the general public, we're eventually realizing that any one given disease, whether it's a rare disease such as Rett syndrome, which has been discussed previously, or the more common diseases, such as breast cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, etc., these will not end up being one disease but many diseases. If a medication is developed with a targeted purpose, targeting that rare disease, then modifying that drug in some way may then be off target. That would be the extent of my knowledge on that matter.
The new technology of next generation sequencing has really been transformative. I would not have predicted its existence even five years ago in my practice, but truly, the opportunity to look at someone's entire genetic code and analyze it now exists. We're using it here in Canada. Canadian researchers have been very successful and internationally competitive in using this technology at a cost that is really close to attainable. It's in the $2,000 to $3,000 range for this type of experiment, which is still a lot of money, but it's not much more than the costs I mentioned earlier of $1,000 to $2,000 to look at a given gene, which is the current way we do it now, one by one, or the cost of an MRI scan or other technologies that we currently use, and these costs are plummeting. I suspect these costs will be less in a few years. It won't be the price that will be the barrier anymore.
There are issues when you sequence someone's entire genetic code to try to find a diagnosis. You will generate enormous amounts of data. You need computers that can handle that and specially trained people who can handle that, and you will identify findings—and I alluded to this briefly in my brief—that are, we could say, incidental. They're not the reason that you did the test. You're examining a child who has a developmental problem and you find that she has a breast cancer gene that might affect her when she's older but might affect her mother now. How do you deal with that?
Then there will be spin-off health care costs to that. You might now be ordering mammograms or breast MRIs you hadn't anticipated. These are not unsolvable problems. The world is thinking about them in a very thoughtful way and Canada is helping to lead that. I anticipate that these technologies will be quite democratized so eventually they will be quite readily available. I think if anything, my plea would be for Canada to lead the world in implementing them in a thoughtful way and not in a non-thoughtful way, because if we do this poorly, we will regret it.
I think we're nearly at the point now where implementing this technology early could save money. It is expensive. Right now you can get these kinds of tests commercially in the States for about $10,000. That's probably too expensive for the health care system to manage, but we're getting close to having it there. When I speak of the diagnostic oddity, the children who I see and the children and the families that the other witnesses speak to often come to the clinic for five or ten years. That's missed work. That's parking at the hospital. That's hospital visits. That's invasive tests, biopsies, MRI scans. The costs often far exceed $10,000, and it's five to ten years of wasted time where we could have had a diagnosis and focused our energy in a different way.
