Complete Genomics Drives Down Cost of Genome Sequence to $5,000

Complete Genomics, which offers DNA analysis services to drugmakers and other companies, will begin in June to sequence human genomes for $5,000, a far cry from the $2.3 billion the first sequencing cost in 2003.
The service will be offered to drugmakers, biotechnology companies, and academic centers, said Clifford Reid, chairman and chief executive officer of the closely held Mountain View, California-based company, in a telephone interview. It won’t be available to individuals.

Studying variations in the human genome, the complete set of genes, may help scientists and drugmakers understand what makes people vulnerable to certain diseases, and how they’ll respond to drugs, Reid said.

“We think this is what the pharma companies have been waiting for,” he said today in a telephone interview. “We’ll be bringing a new customer to the market that’s potentially the biggest customer for DNA sequencing.”

Only about 20 human genomes have been fully sequenced to date. Complete Genomics said it will sequence 1,000 by year’s end, Reid said.

Studies have shown that analyzing certain genes, such as HER-2 linked to breast cancer and KRAS linked to colon cancer, can tell doctors whether patients are likely to respond to drugs. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration may eventually require that genomic studies be included as part of applications for approval, said George Church, a Harvard University geneticist.

Equipment Costs $600,000

Illumina Inc. and Applied Biosystems Inc. sell DNA sequencing machines that cost about $600,000. Most companies and laboratories may still find it more efficient to buy their own sequencing equipment rather than use Complete Genomics’s services, said Ross Muken, a Deutsche Bank analyst in New York who follows the equipment makers.

“I think the cost needs to come down considerably, and the process needs to become commoditized,” before companies will send out samples for sequencing, Muken said. “I think we’re still a few years away from that.”

Church said the company’s price may already be low enough.

“People are becoming more comfortable with outsourcing, if the cost is reasonable,” he said. “It’s getting hard to justify the cost of the machines.”

Reid described the use of Complete Genomics’s technology to sequence a full genome today at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting in Marco Island, Florida. A comparison of the genome with a standardized version used by scientists revealed thousands of previously unseen gene mutations, he said.

Sequencing Accelerates

The U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute began a project last year to fully sequence 1,000 genomes at a cost of about $50 million, or $50,000 per sequence. Complete Genomics plans to sequence 20,000 genomes in 2010 alone.

The human genome, which was fully decoded in 2003 in a $2.3 billion project, is made up of 3 billion pairs of chemicals, called bases, that carry the instructions cells need to make proteins, tissues and organs.

Technological advances in the field have accelerated. Knome, which sequences genomes for individuals, this year dropped the price of its service to about $99,500 from $350,000.

Complete Genomics has driven down the use of costly chemical reagents that identify each of the four bases that make up human DNA, Reid said. While most labs use about $100,000 worth of reagents for a single genome, his company will spend about $1,000 on the supplies for each sequence, he said.