Cost to sequence a genome may be down to $5000

[Juche]

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/12/17/1719861.aspx




How much does it cost to decode your genome? Last year, the going rate was $1 million. Now prices are plunging - and as a result, the prospects for personalized medicine and other genetic innovations are rising.

To get a sense of how deeply prices are plunging, let's start with the whopping price tag of $3 billion for the Human Genome Project, which produced a composite readout of the DNA code from many donors by 2003.

It took a few years more to publish the first complete genome for a single human - specifically, genetic entrepreneur Craig Venter - at an estimated cost of $70 million to $100 million. Nobel-winning biologist James Watson's genome was also done up last year at a cost of roughly $1 million.

In the past year, genome-decoding has gone commercial - almost to the point of sparking a price war. A 2-year-old company called 23andMe is offering an analysis of 600,000 key DNA markers for $399 (marked down from $999). Other companies - including deCODE and Navigenics - are in the marker-analysis business as well, with services listed at prices ranging from less than $1,000 to $2,500.

You can get your entire 6-billion-base-pair genome decoded by a 1-year-old company called Knome at a cost of $100,000 (slashed from $350,000). And now Complete Genomics is gearing up to provide whole-genome analysis for $5,000 a pop.


That is actually faster than Kurzweil predicted prices would go down



Even at $100,000 that is only $0.00003 per base pair. Kurzweil only predicted about $0.01 per base pair around 2008.

[GreenPartyVoter]

1. Let me know when it gets to $5

[anigbrowl]

2. Interesting how closely it coresponds with Moore's law

which i think is not going away, despite the leveling out of clock speeds. GATTACA is not far behind, it appears.