Illumina! Not Illuminati! Illumina!
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http://www.illumina.com/-----------------------------------------------------------------
The race for the $1,000 genome has been won.
Biotech firm Illumina sent shockwaves through the biotech industry this week by unveiling a new machine that it says can sequence a full human genome for $1,000. Until Illumina came along, it cost approximately $5,000 to sequence the human genome, a price that puts the service out of range for many patients.
Illumina’s supercomputing machine, which is a combination of ten machines working together and is called the “HiSeq X Ten,” is available to purchase at a starting price of $10 million. This is too expensive for most labs, but three of these machines have been acquired by Macrogen, The Harvard-MIT Broad Institute in Cambridge, and the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia.
The HiSeq X Ten can partially sequence five human genomes per day. The company says it can completely sequence 16 human genomes within three days. According to Illumina chief executive Jay Flatley, the HiSeq X Ten can sequence human genomes accurately enough to reliably identify DNA variants 10 times faster than its predecessor.
The new machine is designed to sequence thousands of genomes each year for a $1,000 a pop. At that price, an institution could expect to recoup the cost of purchasing the HiSeq X Ten in about five years, exclusive of operating costs. That may be a reasonable proposition for providers that can afford to pay the initial purchasing fee. However, while the $10 million price tag takes into account the cost of the machines and the chemicals needed to do the sequencing, it doesn’t account for overhead, such as power, data storage, and labor.
Full-genome sequencing is much different from the DNA sequencing offered by commercial outfits like 23andMe, which focuses on identifying short genetic sequences within a person’s genome, not on sequencing the entire genome.
The first crop of customers purchasing Illumina’s machine might opt to charge patients more than $1,000. However, by keeping the price tag low, they should be able to reach a mass market who will pay out of pocket to sequence their whole genome for the purposes of medical testing.
At the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, Illumina also unveiled a desktop-sized, $250,000 machine called the NextSeq 500, which is designed for the lab and can handle just one genome at a time. It can only handle some of the most common sequencing operations. The company said this machine would reach customers in March.
http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/17/this-is-real-innovation-illuminas-new-machine-slashes-cost-of-sequencing-your-genome-to-1000/
