Growth in commercial disease gene tests, 2008 update : Genetic Future

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Daniel MacArthur
I write about the genetic and evolutionary basis of human variation, and the companies trying to sell you information about your genome.

Daniel also blogs about personal genomics at Genomes Unzipped.

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Growth in commercial disease gene tests, 2008 update

Category: commercial genetic testing • disease genetics
Posted on: March 13, 2009 11:45 AM, by Daniel MacArthur

I just noticed that GeneTests, a voluntary listing of US and international laboratories offering in-house genetic tests, has released an updated version of their graph of commercially available tests:

You can see immediately that as the number of tested diseases continues to climb, the number of testing laboratories has plateaued - at least partly the result of more efficient testing methods, and of specialised "boutique" testing labs being swallowed up or out-competed by larger players.

As of today, GeneTests lists 606 laboratories testing for 1,705 diseases; 1,419 of the tests are "clinical" and the remaining 286 are restricted to research applications.