Illumina Accelerator Program
illumina.com
illumina.com
>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...
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!
I have no knowledge in this area, any thoughts on this deal by someone who does?
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?