I am just returning from the Tri-Molecular Conference in San Francisco and one strong theme emerged
- There is lots of enthusiasm for molecular diagnostics
- There is lots of disappointment about molecular diagnostics
- The simpler and more actionable the solution the more likely it is that somebody is starting to make money on it
I spent a good part of the first day walking the aisles of the trade show looking for potential collaborators to push molecular data into Electronic Medical Records (EMRs). To my amazement, the majority of people in the trade show were involved in molecular diagnostics on some level but very few (actually none) could point to clinical applications.
I vented some frustration about this during a roundtable discussion later in the day and I was corrected pretty quickly by some very knowledgeable people. The problem was that I tended to define molecular diagnostics through my own lens of pharmacogenetics, but the applications that are gaining adoption on a large scale are much simpler, unambiguous, and actionable. Two key applications were molecular tests for gonorrhea (have you noticed that people always lower their voice when they say gonorrhea?) and H1N1.
This was just the first illustration of the point repeated many times over three days that molecular tests with unambiguous unambiguous and actionable results are rapidly adopted and tests with uncertain results and questionable actions are not yet. This is really an obvious now that everyone has spent so much money trying to do the cool complex stuff first.
