Discount Dna

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So far, Complete has raised $46 million in venture capital, including a small investment from Genentech. It plans to sell its services to pharmaceutical companies, researchers, and businesses offering genetic testing, not directly to consumers.

 
One direct-to-consumer company, Massachusetts-based Knome, currently offers a full genomic sequencing for $350,000. Knome C.E.O. Jorge Conde has said that he is in discussions with Complete to buy its service, a move that would substantially reduce Knome's fee—which includes the cost of both the sequencing and a personalized analysis of the data produced.    
 
Complete Genomics' business plan has another twist that sets it apart from most other sequencing companies, explains Reid in the company's conference room. He says the company plans to sell just the data, and not the expensive sequencing machines that have been the mainstay of companies such as Applied Biosystems and Illumina. "We handle the machines and the data management," he says.
 
Reid's company is now building the world's largest commercial human-genome-sequencing center. It expects to sequence 200 genomes per day by the end of 2010, he says. Over the next five years, the company plans to build 10 more centers with a goal of sequencing 1 million complete human genomes. "The cost will go down as we scale up," says Reid.
 
The downside to this whipsaw reduction in the cost of sequencing is that the technology to produce the data is ahead of anyone's ability to analyze and understand. Even the few dozen genetic markers now being sold by direct-to-consumer companies such as 23andMe for disease risk factors and other traits have yet, in most cases, to be fully tested and validated (see column series: You 2.0).
 
Recently, the science journal Nature Biotechnology described a "data glut" that is going to slow down the usefulness of this information and possibly create a barrier in the potential market.
 
Reid says his company is attempting to deal with this by providing a massive computer system to manage the data and to "reduce it to a form suitable for doing science with it." He also expects the applications of the data to catch up with the data generation.
 
"The thought leaders in pharmacogenomics and disease research are dying to get their hands on these high-quality complete sequence data sets," he says. "It will first roll out to the early adopters, who blaze the trail for everyone else. The early adopters are ready to go."
 
I just wonder what a genome will cost, say, in a couple of months. At the rate the cost is dropping, it may soon cost the same as, say, a tank of gasoline—or the cost of War and Peace. But I hope the price will include not only the CliffsNotes for a quick summary, but also extensive annotation for those of us not up on our 19th century Russian history—or the intricacy of our own six billion nucleotides.

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