Genes and future of medicine
“It’s the size of a computer printer,” he said. Green said his institute has directed some funding to Guilford, Connecticut, and San Francisco based Ion Torrent for its $50,000 sequencer.
“This may completely crash and burn,” he acknowledged. But he and others were intrigued at the company’s compact system to detect individual molecules of hydrogen as a way to sequence the A, C, T, G code of DNA. In another room was Pacific Biosystems’ $750,000 sequencer the size of a conference table.
“It is the Wild West,” Green said. “It is emblematic of what is going on in the field now, with not one, not two, not three but multiple technologies.” They are doing what the companies and the researchers want, and prices are plummeting. “There is a mix of science and business here,” said Green.
If genome sequencing is to transform medicine, it will have to be quick and easy to do. “One could imagine that acquiring a complete genome sequence of an individual might become the standard of care one day,” he said. “What these companies are doing is giving us a taste of the future of medicine.”
Dr Richard Gibbs, who directs the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said there are about 20 to 30 sequencing companies out there that are trying new things.
He said scientists had expected to have to wait for these machines to produce real breakthroughs, but the ones by Illumina and Life Technologies are cranking out so much data and the price is falling so quickly that they are likely to be the ones that transform medicine.
Illumina’s chief executive Jay Flatley said storing and analyzing the trillions of bits of data generated by their machines will likely be the biggest future stumbling block for sequencing companies, but they are confident they can do it.
The high expense is not stopping China, which is making a big push into genomics. The Beijing Genomics Institute just bought 128 Illumina machines and is employing 1,000 researchers to focus on illnesses that are specific to Asian populations. They may also find new markets for drugs.
“Most genomics research has been done on Caucasians based in Europe or the US and we are only just starting to understand how applicable these findings are to worldwide or Asian populations,” said Martin Hibberd of the Genome Institute of Singapore.
However, none of this means people should rush out to have their DNA tested by companies such as 23andMe and DecodeMe. “I’d hesitate to call them a scam,” said Frances Flinter, a member of Britain's Human Genetics Commission.