Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything

by Kelly Weinersmith

But in a precision medicine paradigm, the idea is that we eventually have a treatment that targets every possible mutation.

Elevated costs

A major problem is and will continue to be cost. Ivacaftor, that cystic fibrosis treatment we mentioned before, will only be used by a few thousand people in the United States. There is probably no economy of scale to be had. So that treatment costs about $300,000 a year. Unless we arrive at extremely generalized cheap methods for drug preparation, it will be hard to drive down the cost of a product with so few consumers.

As medicine becomes more and more personalized, this system becomes less and less tenable. There may come a time when all insured people must be genotyped. Those with favorable genotypes will pay less for insurance, while those with unfavorable genotypes will pay more. The lucky will be luckier and the unlucky will be unluckier.