In his January article on Xconomy Boston, David R. Walt, Robinson Professor of Chemistry at Tufts University, and a co-founder, director, and chairman of the scientific advisory board of San Diego-based Illumina, briefly touched on “five transformational biotechnologies coming in the future.”

First on his list was the trend of “increasing throughput and decreasing cost.” He cites the example of generating the first human genome sequence, which took 10 years and several billion dollars, can now be done “in a few days at roughly 10,000 times lower cost.” The one thing that might hamper this advancement will be “data processing and bioinformatics,” which he refers to as the bottleneck for the industry particularly as researchers continue to “assemble and compare large numbers of genomes.”

Secondly, Ward suggests that due to the “availability of many full human sequences, the identification of rarer, and perhaps more meaningful single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), is in the works. Microarrays are already available with millions of SNPs. With better sequence information, the content on microarrays will improve. The next round of genome wide association studies will be conducted and we will know if the ‘missing heritability’ can be found.”

Third, Ward predicts that personalized medicine will finally help with cancer and other diseases. With the increase in the sequencing of genomes, diseased tissue samples will be compared with healthy tissue samples from the same patient to be able to determine the differences and create customized treatments.

Fourth, the advancements in imaging technology will have a greater impact on clinical diagnostics. These technologies are being used to monitor live cells in the laboratory in real time and providing high resolution images of the smallest components of the cell. Ward suggests that these methods will “advance and migrate into the clinic where label-free imaging will be conducted to identify lesions at the sub-cellular level.”

Finally, Ward commented that single molecule measurements, which have increased in popularity in physics and biomedical research applications, will lead to “more sensitive measurements of biomarkers that have not even been detected yet.”

While Ward concludes with the idea that we will be disappointed by advancements in some areas, while pleasantly surprised in others, the next decade looks to provide a variety of new opportunities driven by the need for improvements in health care and the dollars available for biotechnology innovation.

Got your own ideas of what disruptive biotech ideas we should watch out for in the next decade? Add your comments below.

Also, visit Xconomy.com to read the article in its entirety.

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