Illumina, the leading maker of DNA sequencers, will launch a new machine that can read a human genome in a little more than a day, dramatically faster than its current market-dominating machine.
The announcement, made by Illumina chief executive Jay Flatley at the JP Mogan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco and shared with Forbes in advance of the meeting, comes only hours after Illumina’s main competitor, Life Technologies, announced that it would be launching a machine that would eventually be able to sequence a human genome in just hours for a per-genome cost of as little as $1,000.
The biggest differences between the two machines will be in quality and cost. Illumina’s machine, Flatley says, will cost $740,000, and will be available as an upgrade to the company’s current $690,000 machines. It will provide scientists with exactly the kind of data that researchers have come to expect: right now, 90% of DNA base pairs that are sequenced are read out off of an Illumina machine. Diagnostics businesses like Genomic Health and Sequenom are already making use of it. “If you want to do large-scale sequencing of human genomes, Illumina is the way to do it.”
But the Life Technologies Machine, dubbed the Ion Proton, will cost just $150,000, a dramatic drop in entry cost that may itself entice some scientists at a time when the National Institutes of Health is expected to cut funding. Before this announcement, Goldman Sachs estimated that the number of new DNA sequencers Illumina would place would drop 38%.
The introduction of these two machines sets the stage for a dramatic duel between perhaps the two most important executives in the commercial turf war that has led the speed of reading genomes to fall even faster than the tech industry’s famous Moore’s Law that juiced the speed of microprocessors. On one side is Flatley, who by launching a machine called the Genome Analyzer five years ago set DNA sequencing on a rapid track that has dropped the price of sequencing a person’s DNA from $500,000 to less than $5,000.
On the other is Jonathan Rothberg, who heads Life’s Ion Torrent division. Rothberg introduced the first of a new generation of faster DNA sequencers, only to have his company bought by Roche and then dominated by Flatley and Illumina. A year ago, Rothberg and Life launched a new DNA sequencer, the Personal Genome Machine, that could do small sequencing jobs (think looking at the tiny genomes of bacteria) and had a price tag of only $50,000, and cost an additional $100 each time it was run.
Illumina introduced its own small machine, the MiSeq, that allowed researchers to get same day results at a cost of $100,000 per machine. So far, the Ion Torrent PGM has proved more popular.
The time it takes to get results has been one of the few complaints genetics researchers have had about Illumina’s technology. It can take eight days to generate genetic data, and then there is another bottleneck as computers must analyze it. Making same day analysis possible is seen as vital as researchers try to move DNA into the clinic. With the new machine he is introducing, Flatley is reducing the selling point of the new Ion Torrent machine.
But Flatley’s not eliminating some major selling points for the new machine, says Chad Nusbaum, the co-director of the Genome Sequencing and Analysis Program at the Broad Institute and an early customer on the new Ion Torrent system. He says he expects data quality on the new Ion Torrent system to be worse, but not so much so that collecting extra runs won’t help. And at the end of the day, the low cost to buy the Ion Torrent machine is likely to win it fans.
“The speed is good, but the cost is going to be a blocker,” for the new Illumina machine says Nusbaum. “We’re in a world where you can buy a machine for a lot less. Now machines are getting cheap again, and I think that is what the world is going to expect. Otherwise it costs you too much to get in the game.”
