Sequence Your Genome For $1,000?

January 15, 2014

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

A thousand bucks can get you that new MacBook Air or serve as a sizeable down payment on a new car. But a longer-term investment might be to sequence your entire personal genome.

On Tuesday, Ilumina, the worlds leading seller of gene sequencing machines, unveiled HiSeq X Ten the first supercomputer made to process 20,000 human genomes annually at a cost of $1,000 each.

At a conference in San Francisco, Illuminas CEO Jay Flatleysaid customers will start to see the DNA-sequencing machine on the market in the first quarter of 2014.

This will be a blockbuster product, he told Bloomberg News.

The $1,000-mark is a major milestone for the genetic sequencing industry, which has been trying to hit that goal for years. Experts have predicted that this price point would allow for the mainstreaming of genetic sequencing and a resulting multiplication of genetic data that could lead to an explosion in medical breakthroughs.

To figure out cancer, we need to sequence hundreds of thousands of cancer genomes, and this is the way to do it, Flatley explained.

John Mattick, executive director of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia, said in an Illumina press release that his institution would seek to leverage this new technology in pursuit of its research goals.

The sequencing capacity and economies of scale of the HiSeq X Ten facility will also allow Garvan to accelerate the introduction of clinical genomics and next-generation medicine in Australia, Mattick said. We expect the HiSeq X Ten to underpin a new phase of collaboration between government, industry and other medical research stakeholders.

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Sequence Your Genome For $1,000?