On a bad day in the lab, we sometimes joke that if we really wanted to help save lives, we’d forget about molecular biology and go help people quit smoking. Relatively simple public health efforts – clean water, washing your hands before moving from one sick patient to another, basic vaccines – generally save many more lives that the cures that come out of the high tech stuff we do in the lab. Cancer immunotherapy may turn out to be a major advance in cancer treatment, but we’d reduce cancer even more if we could get everyone to quit smoking, lose weight, and stay physically active.
Genomics, whose near-term medical benefits have been the subject of a lot of hype, may turn out to be a high-tech, scientifically complex effort that actually does to have a big impact on people’s lives. As I discuss in my Pacific Standard column this week, part of that will be the long-term medical benefits that grow out of a better understanding of biology. But a more dramatic – and more near-term – impact may be how genomics changes public health. As some sort of genome analysis becomes a routine part of normal medical care, genetics will be integrated with other public health screenings (like testing your cholesterol), which, as two recent studies show, could have a big impact on avoiding preventable consequences of common diseases. Once exome sequencing is cheap enough, there could be a possible benefit of combining genomic screenings using existing medical knowledge – we don’t need to wait for distant future discoveries.
The takeaway is that policy and the infrastructure of the healthcare system, and not science, may soon be the rate-limiting step for realizing the medical benefits of genomics in some cases. Physicians, insurers, hospitals, and the health care system in general is utterly unprepared to handle the kinds of genomic data that could, in the near future, improve routine medical care.
The Finch and Pea 