The Art of Timing in Emerging Technologies in Biotech
We’re well into the winter break, and I’ve been keeping myself busy by building a pipeline to calculate 10x Visium spot uncertainty scores (will be posted to my github soon). It’s been much more time-consuming than I initially thought, with new concerns seeming to appear following each small step forward. But that’s science I guess; every answer produces another question. One such concern that popped into my head is that spatial transcriptomics might never be widespread enough to make this pipeline particularly useful. But since I’m already 3 weeks into the project, I’m just going to argue against this concern by reviewing the history of omics technologies. Today, you can sequence multiple human genomes with good depth for a couple hundred dollars, but when it first came out in 2006, Illumina’s DNA sequencer cost $300,000 for a single human genome. I’m sure a lot of professionals back then assumed that the cost made Illumina sequencing unusable for drug development. However, early...