Last week, Andrew Lee, Vice President of Strategic Operations, and I attended the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, an annual investor conference here in San Francisco that brings some 25,000 people to the city. The big news this year came from Life Technologies and Illumina, which both announced platforms that will be capable of sequencing an entire human genome in a day. Life Tech in particular noted that its same-day genome sequence will cost $1,000 in reagents — effectively putting an end to a race that began 10 years ago, when scientists first started seriously competing to achieve the $1,000 genome.
With this price point achieved, we expect people to sequence genomes at a much faster clip than ever before. Indeed, a survey from GenomeWeb and Mizuho Securities found that scientists anticipate that sequencing data will increase 32 percent this year over 2011, and increase another 38 percent next year compared to this year. That’s exciting on the data analysis front: As the volume of DNA data grows exponentially, it’s even more important to have a scalable platform to manage, store, and analyze that data securely and efficiently. The GenomeWeb/Mizuho survey also found that people expect to spend more on informatics in 2012 than they did in 2011.
After all, mainstream genome sequencing won’t be possible until the analysis costs come down by orders of magnitude. Even with so much attention on cutting the price tag for sequencing technologies, that didn’t translate to matching improvements for data costs. The race to the $1,000 genome may be over, but as it turns out, that was just the first leg of a relay. Now the baton has been passed to the data management and analysis folks, and it’s our turn to run as fast as we can.