Next-next-gen sequencer raises $100M

As I've mentioned a couple of times here, the current crop of personal genomics products (which scan a meagre 500,000 to a million DNA positions - a fraction of 1% of your complete genome) are basically place-holders for the rapidly approaching era of affordable whole-genome sequencing.

At the moment the rapid sequencing market is being dominated by three "next-generation" sequencing platforms: Roche's 454, Illumina's Solexa, and the SOLiD platform from Applied Biosystems (which was recently gobbled up by consumables giant Invitrogen). These three platforms are currently enthusiastically jostling for position - for instance, competing with each other to offer their services to the international 1000 Genomes Project - in an attempt to establish themselves as the technology of choice as the age of medical genomics looms ever closer. With each evolutionary iteration of these technologies their sequencing capacity and accuracy improves, enabling truly mind-boggling amounts of sequence to be generated (exhibit A: the Sanger Institute's recent one trillion base pair milestone).

But while these next-gen technologies - each with hefty financial backing from a major company - are stacking up the bases, a new generation of upstart "next-next-generation" platforms is developing their own revolutionary approaches to sequencing. One of the most promising of these platforms is the SMRT system from Pacific Biosciences, which uses fictional-sounding technology called zero-mode waveguides to detect the incorporation of fluorescent bases into a single, immobilised DNA molecule (you can see for yourself how the PacBio system works in this pretty promotional video).

Apparently PacBio's technology (along with the fancy graphics, and the fact that it has zero-mode waveguides!) has convinced the people that matter: GenomeWeb News notes that the company has raised a hefty $100 million from investors to develop a commercial platform, which is expected to hit the market in 2010. In other words, the already-seething large-scale sequencing market will soon be getting even more interesting.

As I've noted before, I really don't care who wins this technological arms race: all that matters to me is that so long as it's being run my own genome sequence (and yours) is becoming rapidly more affordable.

(Image from Pacific Biosciences.)


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