Biggest gene sequence project to launch

La Jolla researcher J. Craig Venter is opening the largest genetic sequencing center in the world, the latest chapter of his historic, lifelong quest to identify the genes that cause and contribute to everything from cancer to dementia.

Venter says he will exploit a major advance in technology to sequence up to 40,000 genomes a year -- a figure that will rise to 100,000 as he phases in more cutting-edge sequencing machines from San Diegos Illumina.

He raised $70 million to co-found Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI), a company that will sequence genes for a fraction of what it cost just over a decade ago.

The sequencing will initially be offered to patients at UC San Diegos Moores Cancer Center before being rolled out to hospitals around the nation. The company also will analyze a persons microbes and metabolic condition to get a fuller picture of a patients health and to improve treatment.

Knowledge about yourself, your genome, gives you power, said Venter, an alumnus of the University of California San Diego. If you have lung cancer the most important thing you can know is your genome. It is probably the most democratic way for people to have control over their own medical outcomes.

Venter, 67, co-founded HLI with two notable futurists and physicians, Robert Hariri and Peter Diamandis. His investors include Malaysian billionaire K.T. Lim, Steve Jurvetson and Illumina.

Diamandis said he believed the having your genome sequenced would become as common as a urinalysis and that, eventually, "100 will be the next 60."

Cancer is the company's first target. HLI also will tackle increasingly common afflictions such as Alzheimers and Parkinsons disease. The diseases are a large and growing focus of local scientists, including those at UC San Diego, which last year created an Institute for Genomic Medicine.

Venter is moving to capitalize on a major technological advance by San Diegos Illumina, widely considered to be the worlds leading sequencing company. As recently as 2007 it cost about $10 million to sequence one genome. Illumina found ways to process samples more quickly and cheaply. In January, the company announced a new sequencing system that lowered the cost of analyzing one genome to less than $1,000 a figure that seemed inconceivable when the Human Genome Project began in the 1990s.

The company is buying two of Illuminas new HiSeq X Ten Sequencing systems, which sell for $10 million each. These can sequence genomes in about three days, and do roughly 32 of them in one week. It took scientists 13 years, and cost about $3 billion, to sequence the first genome, a project that was completed in 2003.

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Biggest gene sequence project to launch