Alzheimers, cancer, heart disease. Conditions known for both their ubiquity and their deadliness, affecting millions of people yearly.

Yet early detection can stop all of these in their tracks. New Alzheimer’s drugs and behavioral interventions can significantly slow it before permanent brain destruction. Early detection of cancer can lead to tumor removal and halting further growth before the cancer spreads. And diet, exercise, and medications can prevent fatal heart attacks.

Diagnostic technology helps patients respond to a host of other diseases too. Diabetes, liver disease, kidney disease, hypertension, osteoporosis, hepatitis B and C, HIV, glaucoma and COPD are all diseases where early detection can shape patient behavior or instigate specific treatments that can effectively treat the condition.

Yet the right diagnostics can be inaccessible due to cost, efficacy, and convenience. And tests with significant false-positive rates lead to more costs and stress than people are ready for. The result: diagnostics are both a huge opportunity for innovation and a huge market, worth $200B globally.

Dropping Input Costs

Costs for sequencing DNA have declined by 1,000,000,000x over the last 25 years.

The volume of mass-spec research has grown more than 10x in the last 30 years.

While harder to quantify, other synbio and chemical tools have gotten significantly better too, reducing false positive rates and dropping costs. Computational chemistry has improved by XXXX (Ask Alex).

Medical devices and electronic miniaturization have accelerated convenience of diagnostics too. For example, the 2 college dropouts who started Athelas in 2016 were able to build a medical diagnostic device in that could work from a patient’s home with less than $5M in funding, whereas past devices for blood testing would have typically cost at least 3x more to design, and 5x more to manufacture.