Tag Archive for 'pacific biosciences'

The Archon X Prize for Genomics offers a $10 million prize to to the first team that can sequence 100 human genomes within 10 days or less at a total cost of $10,000, with strict criteria for accuracy and completeness. However, given that there aren’t currently any gold standard genomes that could be used to confirm that a team has met the Prize’s requirements, and the complexity of judging the winner is far greater than for any previous award from the X Prize Foundation. To help refine the validation process, the Prize Foundation has just announced a collaboration with Nature to crowd-source ideas, which can be submitted via comments on the current plan over at Nature Precedings. If you’re interested in helping to define the state of the art in human genome construction, head over and have your say. [DM]

This week MIT’s Technology Review released this year’s TR50, a list of the 50 most innovative companies. Biomedical companies make a good showing, with 8 in total. Excitingly, three of these companies have been chosen for innovations in DNA sequencing technology; Complete Genomics, for developing the service approach to sequencing human genomes, Life Technologies for aquiring the new Ion Torrent machine, and Pacific Biosciences for their single-molecule sequencing machines. [LJ]

Over at Forbes, Matthew Herper pointed out the announcement of an exciting new targeted drug for cystic fibrosis that showed greater than expected results in clinical trials, as well as the announcement by Life Technologies of an impending upgrade to their Ion Torrent sequencing platform (also comprehensively dissected by Keith Robison here and here). This all sounds like good news, but Herper warned in a separate post that the implications of recent developments in genomics and pharmaceuticals might be heading towards a chaotic impact:
Continue reading ‘Defining a complete genome, innovative sequencers, and the mess ahead for personalised medicine’