Widening Access With Technology

Despite this rapid revolution in the advancement of the science and medicine and the technology, we still have a last mile access problem. By that I mean the following. Having sufficient clinicians, medical practitioners who know how to use this information is our biggest impediment. And that's because the field has grown so quickly that we have such a small specialty area. In the genetics and genomics realm. We, in fact, in this country have only 2,000 geneticists. In the entire nation, we have about 5,000 genetic counselors, including a program here at Stanford among those experts. For a population of 330 million, that is simply insufficient. This ultimately touches just about every area of medicine. So ultimately, your primary care doctor, your pediatrician, an OB gyn, a cardiologist, neurologist, they're all going to need to know something about genomics. But to get from where we are today in that future world is going to be a journey. And that is the journey that I am trying to solve. I'm trying to break down those barriers and really shepherd in this new era of genomic medicine in a really medically responsible way, but a much more efficient and scalable way than has ever been done before. To give you a little bit on why this matters, it's estimated that about 7% of the world's population actually has a genetic disorder. Most of that is undiagnosed. We just simply haven't had the tools and technologies to be able to get there. It affects cancer, cardiovascular disease, 1 out of 50 new live births, and virtually everybody in this room is carrying conditions as recessive carrier conditions that could affect your children or future generations to come. Everybody in this room has markers that could predict your response to drugs. And so, in this future world of precision medicine, where we can treat the right patient with the right drug at the right time, that's really what leads to improved patient outcomes and reduced cost of care in the healthcare system today.