Lets assume I am someone remotely important for a journalist to interview me and ask the following question.
“What life science story from 2007 has surprised you?”
This is an easier question to answer than one might think. Like many others, my gut feeling was that next-generation sequencing was the next big thing, but broader adoption, especially commercial adoption was going to happen slowly. Boy, was I wrong. The field moved at a dizzy pace. 454 got acquired by Roche Applied Science, Solexa got acquired by Illumina (for $600m), ABI commercialized Agencourt as SOLiD, Helicos went public, and those are just the big boys. The space has become increasingly crowded with a number of technologies, all competing to sequence the $1000 genome. VentureBeat points us to another company, Intelligent Bio-Systems, which claims technology that would make it possible to sequence a genome for $5000 in 24 hours.
I suspect that in the next few years, we will see further consolidation in this space, and cost reductions. As it is core facilities, service providers and pharma companies are beginning to acquire these systems at least 2 years ahead of the time I had predicted at the beginning of the year, despite high costs. Once costs fall into “reasonable” territory, I see an explosion in the number of next-gen systems out there. In other words, lots (and when I say lots I mean lots) of data, new technical challenges, bragging rights, and best of all the opportunity to do some really cool science. Perhaps before you know, consumer genomics companies will really be sequencing your genome for < $5000 or so (I am adding their margins into the price 
).
Technorati Tags: next-gen sequencing, genome sequencing, Intelligent Bio-Systems
And you thought consumer genomics was a crowded space
Lets assume I am someone remotely important for a journalist to interview me and ask the following question.
“What life science story from 2007 has surprised you?”
This is an easier question to answer than one might think. Like many others, my gut feeling was that next-generation sequencing was the next big thing, but broader adoption, especially commercial adoption was going to happen slowly. Boy, was I wrong. The field moved at a dizzy pace. 454 got acquired by Roche Applied Science, Solexa got acquired by Illumina (for $600m), ABI commercialized Agencourt as SOLiD, Helicos went public, and those are just the big boys. The space has become increasingly crowded with a number of technologies, all competing to sequence the $1000 genome. VentureBeat points us to another company, Intelligent Bio-Systems, which claims technology that would make it possible to sequence a genome for $5000 in 24 hours.
I suspect that in the next few years, we will see further consolidation in this space, and cost reductions. As it is core facilities, service providers and pharma companies are beginning to acquire these systems at least 2 years ahead of the time I had predicted at the beginning of the year, despite high costs. Once costs fall into “reasonable” territory, I see an explosion in the number of next-gen systems out there. In other words, lots (and when I say lots I mean lots) of data, new technical challenges, bragging rights, and best of all the opportunity to do some really cool science. Perhaps before you know, consumer genomics companies will really be sequencing your genome for < $5000 or so (I am adding their margins into the price
).
Technorati Tags: next-gen sequencing, genome sequencing, Intelligent Bio-Systems