Biotech's promise arriving with a price tag

"For 30 years, prognosticators have proclaimed that the future of health care belongs to biotechnology -- to the promise that miraculous and less-expensive treatments will flow from a deeper understanding of disease at the genetic and molecular level of the human body....

Has the future arrived?

Yes and no.

Yes in the case of a few wonder drugs, and in the wealth of research that has inched us closer to teasing out the basic mechanisms of how ailments work...

But the bright future hasn't arrived in this sense: The price tag for creating a promised proliferation of new drugs continues to soar, with the secrets of how to design molecular-based drugs proving frustratingly complex, and far more expensive than anyone imagined."

Read more in this SFGate.com article.