The majority of increased pharmaceutical innovation occurs not from direct GWAS discoveries, but through 1-distance and 2-distance spillovers—genes biologically adjacent to the original finding.
What This Means
When we measure innovation following a GWAS discovery, most of the action happens in neighboring genes—those connected through shared biological pathways.
Direct gene-disease pairs see increased research, but the spillover effect to related pairs is substantially larger. The closer the biological relationship, the stronger the effect.
Implication: Traditional ROI metrics that only count direct outcomes miss the majority of the value created by GWAS research.