DNA profiling for susceptibility to disease soon will be widely available, a University of SA expert says.

Director of the university's Phenomics and Bioinformatics Research Centre Associate Professor Desmond Lun said the price of having your DNA sequenced had dropped from about $1 billion six years ago to about $6000 - the cost for package deals in the U.S.

He said the rate at which the costs were coming down meant it was "just a matter of time" before DNA testing for such gene-related diseases, as cancers and neurological disorders, became routine.

Associate Professor Lun warned many issues about DNA profiling would need to be publicly debated.

"Eventually it will come to a point where it happens in a clinical setting and advice will go to doctors as to how they advise patients," he said. "Before then we have to have serious public debate on how the information should be handled, who will have access."

One issue is if the information can remain confidential or if health insurance companies can demand access.

Dr Michael Brisco, a senior lecturer in haemotology and genetic pathology at Flinders University said sequencing was becoming cheaper, but in SA was still mainly used tor familial cancers.

He said there could be dangers in giving people too much non-specific information.

"Sometimes it's not clear what they should do with that information," he said.

"There's the stress of having the test and waiting for the result... and the result could then be suggestive of things but not clearly indicative."

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