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Executive Summary

Rapid advances in biological engineering are poised to dramatically impact the economy. Significant improvements in key technologies used to study and manipulate biological systems at the molecular level—in particular, tools for sequencing and synthesizing DNA—are opening the door to a new era of genome engineering and design. This report examines ways in which these advances in technology could affect the U.S. economy over the next two decades.

Section 2 provides an assessment of the rate of improvement in the performance of key biological technologies and evaluates the potential implications based on analogies to the development of other major technology systems. New approaches to biological engineering are recapitulating developmental stages and pathways experienced in other fields, including aviation, industrial engineering, automotive design, and computer software. Major technological and market trends elaborated in Section 2 include the following:

  • The productivity of DNA sequencing technologies, measured in terms of the number of base pairs sequenced per person per day for a researcher operating multiple machines, has increased more than 500-fold over the past decade (Figure 1-1). At this rate, productivity is doubling every 24 months. Over the same period, the costs of sequencing have declined by more than three orders of magnitude from $1.00 per base pair to less than $0.001 per base pair.
  • Productivity of DNA synthesis technologies has increased 700-fold over the past decade, doubling every 12 months. Costs of gene synthesis have fallen from approximately $30 per base pair to less than $1 per base pair over the same period. At the same time, the accuracy of gene synthesis technologies has improved significantly.
  • The global market for DNA sequencing technology and services exceeded $7 billion in 2006. The market for synthesis reagents and synthesis services reached nearly $1 billion.


Figure 1-1: Productivity Improvements in DNA Synthesis and Sequencing

 

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