Life Technologies Fires Latest Sequencing Salvo
Another week, another drop in the cost of whole-genome sequencing. The latest announcement comes from Life Technologies, which yesterday announced the launch of its SOLiD 4 sequencing system. The details of the announcement are well-covered by GenomeWeb and Matthew Herper of Forbes.com.
In brief, the SOLiD 4 generates 100 gigabases of data per run at a cost of $6,000 per genome, a cost that appears to account solely for the consumables and does not include the cost of the machine or of interpreting all of that sequence data. According to GenomeWeb, Life is also promising an upgrade to its system – SOLiD 4hq – in the second half of 2010 which it expects to triple the data output at half of the cost: 300 megabases per run, $3,000 per sequence.
As for the impact of Life’s SOLiD 4 announcement, Matthew Herper hits the nail on the head:
But although the news is good for Life and will keep it in the game as the price of decoding the genetic code continues to drop, the specs of this new machine don’t seem good enough to upset Illumina’s place as the first choice of geneticists. “It’s a solid improvement, but I don’t think this changes the game,” says Isaac Ro, an analyst at Leerink Swan who follows both companies.
GLR Update: In The Battle for Sequencing Supremacy, is 128 > $10,000?
The biggest industry developments last week were being announced at J.P. Morgan’s 28th Annual Healthcare Conference in San Francisco. The Genomics Law Report covered Illumina’s announcement of its new next-generation genomic sequencing machine (Another Stop on the Road to the $1,000 Genome), the HiSeq 2000, which promises to sequence an entire genome in one week for $10,000. Illumina’s $10,000 price point represents a new commercial sequencing benchmark, but it is unlikely to deter the company’s competitors. Those include sequencing-as-a-service provider Complete Genomics, which followed up Illumina’s announcement with one of its own, declaring that it plans to sequence up to one million human genomes worldwide over the next five years.
I’ve discussed previously the importance of analyzing just what you get when you purchase a whole-genome sequence. Illumina’s $10,000 genome does not include the cost of the machine or the necessary data analysis, whereas Complete Genomics offers human genome sequences starting at $20,000 while providing its own hardware and data analysis. However, as Matthew Herper of Forbes pointed out last week, the real number to pay attention to in Illumina’s announcement may have been 128—the number of new Illumina machines that BGI committed to buy—and not $10,000. As this recent survey of research labs by In Sequence suggests, current or so-called “second-generation” sequencing platforms, including the one utilized by the HiSeq 2000, continue to make inroads into sequencing centers worldwide, posing an obstacle to Complete Genomics and other newcomers attempting to crack the genomic sequencing space that might not be overcome on price alone.
