It is still very much in development. The rate of change of technology will continue to drive costs down. It's not at all clear to me, based on what I know of the cancer treatment system, that costs for detailed genome analysis, even in a clinical setting, are prohibitive. If you consider that the direct costs of a bone marrow transplant are somewhat north of a quarter of a million bucks, $1,000 for a genome analysis to predict who should get that transplant and who should not is an investment, it's not a cost. That's where we are right now. That's why this business of personalized medicine is rearing its head and that's why genomics is being used very heavily in this context.
Dr. Huntsman made the point that there are other measurement tools that can and will be applied to personalized medicine. It's absolutely true. We don't know at this particular point whether or not we will need to do a whole genome analysis on every single patient who might benefit.
One does not have to invoke cost reductions of the technology beyond what exists today to know that personalized medicine is here.
There is an interesting corollary to all of this that emerged in the public domain that some people refer to as “recreational genomics” where you could interface with a company and you could spit in a tube and send them DNA. For the cost of a few thousand dollars you would get back a non-medically relevant readout of what your genome reveals, a propensity for earwax included. These kinds of things were purchased by the public without medical benefit at all. That's why I refer to them as recreational genomics, but it shows what the uptake has been. There were companies founded around this.
Now we're in an era where people are information-aware and they're coming forward. They want this kind of thing. They want personalized medicine. The public will demand it. The question is how do we get there and achieve medical benefits along the way.
Cost reductions will happen and the more we use the technology and, as Dr. Huntsman pointed out, the more people are engaged in using the technology, the more the costs will continue to drop. That will improve feasibility, but it's not going to change the fact that it's real and it's now.