Individualised genomics has yet to take off
ONE way of trying to make money out of the new genomic knowledge has been to offer what has come to be known as “personal genomics”. The results, to put it charitably, have been mixed, and for good reason. The price point is wrong, observes Douglas Fambrough of Oxford Bioscience Partners, a venture-capital firm based in Boston. What you learn from looking at your genome is not yet worth the price you have to pay. Either the price must come down or the value of the product must rise. Both may happen when the latest generation of DNA sequencers are more widely deployed, but at the moment most personal-sequencing companies use gene chips to give a SNP profile, rather than offering a complete sequence.
Two of the earliest entrants to the field were deCODE and 23andMe. DeCODE, an Icelandic firm whose aspirations to become a full-fledged pharmaceutical company were dealt a blow when it went through a bankruptcy restructuring earlier this year, charges $2,000 to search a sample for 1m SNPs predictive of 50 genetic traits, not all of them diseases. Theragen makes a similar offer from South Korea. 23andMe, based in Mountain View, California, charges $499 to search more than half a million SNPs for signs of 154 traits. Navigenics, down the road in Foster City, restricts its analysis ($999) to 28 health conditions and 12 drug responses “that you and your doctor can act on”. Complete Genomics, another Californian firm (Mountain View again), plans to leapfrog the chip-based crowd by offering customers full DNA sequences using a complicated proprietary technology that will not, initially, be for sale to other users. And Knome, a firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, offers a bespoke whole-genome service for the discerning client at $68,500 a pop. …