Financial support, including $100,000 instrument access (MiSeq® System and NextSeq 500™ System), sequencing reagents, 20% research assistant time, $100,000 convertible notes, and an equity line of $20,000 or more
I have no knowledge in this area, any thoughts on this deal by someone who does?
The X10 costs a wee bit more than $100K though. Considering they've carefully controlled access to it to just a small handful of key genome centers, I doubt they'd be handing the things out to random startups.
>Candidate teams are limited to five members. They must be genomic researchers, entrepreneurs, startups, or early-stage companies from academia or industry that aim to take their promising NGS applications to market.
If I were starting a company in the genomics space (maybe someday), I would definitely apply with Illumina. They recently hit a milestone whereby a complete human genome can be sequenced for $1000 [1], which has been a goal for over a decade since it "neatly highlights the chasm between the actual cost of the Human Genome Project, estimated at $2.7 billion over a decade, and the benchmark for routine, affordable personal genome sequencing" [2].
This will be one of the more exciting, and yet at the same time terrifying, areas of research and innovation. Personalized medicine is the future of healthcare, but we'll need brilliant, well-intentioned people to lead us there in a way that benefits us while avoiding the numerous ethical challenges along the way.
Unfortunately the $1000 genome isn't really accessible unless you are inside of a research or clinical setting. Genomes at high-coverage still cost ~$6k, and likely will for the near future.
This makes it very hard to begin utilizing that technology as an independent biotech startup.
It's true that the price has not practically hit $1k, but it's close.
We recently looked to do 1,600 high coverage genomes through one of the X10-capable centers. We were quoted around $1,800 per genome for 101-bp 30X coverage. This price included library prep and some basic bioinformatics.
In comparison, the lowest price for exome sequencing (1.1% of the genome, targeted at the protein-coding regions only. an exome is about 1/10th the size of a whole genome in terms of data size) on the HiSeq 2500 (the earlier generation of Illumina NGS machines) that we ever got was about ~$750 per exome (and that was also at the 1000's scale).
The last thing to consider is that the new X10 centers will be more than happy to take your business-- in order to keep costs under control and to make their investment worth it, they pretty much have to run the sequencers constantly-- something like 18,000 genomes a year!
$1800 per genome at that scale (1600 genomes) seems a little high. We've seen lower quotes through our Sequencing Marketplace at AllSeq (http://allseq.com/x-ten)
The moonshot is human blood/tissue mRNA sequencing with a 30 minute turnaround for under $100.
That requires some insane processing locally to create a gene expression histogram, a secure cloud database to match against other patient data to recommend health markers, and a few terabytes locally of other gene combinations that are known dissease markers to sift through.
AIDS, diabetes, cancer, ... any disease detectable by your gene expression levels being out of whack can be diagnosed.
What Illumina really needs to do if they want a software ecosystem is make a simple Illumina network API for their sequencers, and post an Illumina mock sequence producing server on their Github. https://github.com/sequencing
$100,000 for 10% of an idea seems generous vs. most software accelerators. Wonder what they're expecting by loaning out all their equipment in a dedicated research facility?
Are they expecting actual NGS improvements or are they hoping to facilitate non-NGS innovations that merely use NGS as a tool?
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 49.9 ms ] threadI have no knowledge in this area, any thoughts on this deal by someone who does?
>Candidate teams are limited to five members. They must be genomic researchers, entrepreneurs, startups, or early-stage companies from academia or industry that aim to take their promising NGS applications to market.
If I were starting a company in the genomics space (maybe someday), I would definitely apply with Illumina. They recently hit a milestone whereby a complete human genome can be sequenced for $1000 [1], which has been a goal for over a decade since it "neatly highlights the chasm between the actual cost of the Human Genome Project, estimated at $2.7 billion over a decade, and the benchmark for routine, affordable personal genome sequencing" [2].
This will be one of the more exciting, and yet at the same time terrifying, areas of research and innovation. Personalized medicine is the future of healthcare, but we'll need brilliant, well-intentioned people to lead us there in a way that benefits us while avoiding the numerous ethical challenges along the way.
[1] http://www.illumina.com/systems/hiseq-x-sequencing-system.il...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1,000_genome
This makes it very hard to begin utilizing that technology as an independent biotech startup.
We recently looked to do 1,600 high coverage genomes through one of the X10-capable centers. We were quoted around $1,800 per genome for 101-bp 30X coverage. This price included library prep and some basic bioinformatics.
In comparison, the lowest price for exome sequencing (1.1% of the genome, targeted at the protein-coding regions only. an exome is about 1/10th the size of a whole genome in terms of data size) on the HiSeq 2500 (the earlier generation of Illumina NGS machines) that we ever got was about ~$750 per exome (and that was also at the 1000's scale).
The last thing to consider is that the new X10 centers will be more than happy to take your business-- in order to keep costs under control and to make their investment worth it, they pretty much have to run the sequencers constantly-- something like 18,000 genomes a year!
That requires some insane processing locally to create a gene expression histogram, a secure cloud database to match against other patient data to recommend health markers, and a few terabytes locally of other gene combinations that are known dissease markers to sift through.
AIDS, diabetes, cancer, ... any disease detectable by your gene expression levels being out of whack can be diagnosed.
$100,000 for 10% of an idea seems generous vs. most software accelerators. Wonder what they're expecting by loaning out all their equipment in a dedicated research facility? Are they expecting actual NGS improvements or are they hoping to facilitate non-NGS innovations that merely use NGS as a tool?