California company claims faster, cheaper gene map

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California company claims faster, cheaper gene map

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A California company predicts it will soon be able to sequence an

entire human gene map in four minutes, for just $1,000.

Pacific Biosciences says its new gene-sequencing machines are far

faster than existing equipment, and will be able to do in minutes

what it took the federally funded academic effort five years and $300

million to do, and genome pioneer Craig Venter nine months to do, in

2000.

" It will change health care forever if it works, " Hugh , the

chief executive officer of the company, said in a telephone interview

on Monday.

The company presented its findings to a meeting in Florida on

Saturday.

Last month Knome, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based personal genomics

company, said it was offering people their own personal genome

sequences at a cost of $350,000. said he saw no reason for

individuals to get their gene maps sequenced yet, and said his

company's market was research labs.

" The real idea is to be able to sequence people fast enough and

cheaply enough so we can turn some really interesting discovery

problems in genetics and genetic diseases into software problems, "

said.

" You can sequence 1,000 people who exhibit addictive behavior and

1,000 who don't and see if there any differences between them, "

said.

Government backers of the project are equally enthusiastic.

" In complex diseases like heart disease, there are many different

genes that contribute to the disease and each of those genes has a

small effect, " said Jeff Schloss, who heads the sequencing-

technologies grant program at the National Human Genome Research

Institute.

NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK

Researchers still often do not even know where to begin looking for

genes involved in some diseases, and so benefit from so-called genome-

wide association studies, which are in effect a treasure hunt through

the entire genome.

" The tools we have for understanding the relationship between changes

in the genome and disease require now that we look at lots of people,

that we study a lot of people who have a disease and look at changes

in their genome, " said Schloss, whose institute gave Pacific

Biosciences $6.7 million for its work.

said the company had raised another $72 million from private

investors.

The money is out there for companies that want to find cheaper and

quicker ways to sequence the human gene map. In 2004, the National

Institutes of Health launched a $70 million grant program to

encourage such work, and the Santa , California-based X Prize

Foundation is offering $10 million to the first team to sequence 100

human genomes in 10 days.

thinks Pacific Biosciences' new technology will be able to get

a human genome done in about 4 minutes.

" You could be on the operating table and having a biopsy while under

anesthesia, " he said. Doctors could compare the sequence in a tumor

to the DNA in a patient's healthy cells and perhaps tailor

chemotherapy, he said.

The company will sell the instruments at a cost of somewhere between

$400,000 and $600,000, plus kits with the chemicals and other

components needed to operate them.

Competitors also racing to make a faster, cheaper DNA map include

Solexa, now a division of Illumina Inc, Applied Biosystems, 454 Life

Sciences Corp, a Roche company, and Helicos Biosciences Corp.