The race for the $1,000 genome has been won.
Biotech firm Illumina sent shockwaves through the biotech industry this week by unveiling a new machine that can sequence a full human genome for $1,000. Until Illumina came along, genome sequencing cost approximately $5,000, which is out of range for many patients.
Illumina’s supercomputing machine, which is a combination of ten machines working together called the “HiSeq X Ten,” is available to purchase at a starting price of $10 million. This is too expensive for most labs, but three of these machines have been acquired by Macrogen, The Harvard-MIT Broad Institute in Cambridge, and the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia.
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