How much does it cost to decode your genome? Last year, the going rate was $1 million. Now prices are plunging - and as a result, the prospects for personalized medicine and other genetic innovations are rising.
To get a sense of how deeply prices are plunging, let's start with the whopping price tag of $3 billion for the Human Genome Project, which produced a composite readout of the DNA code from many donors by 2003.
It took a few years more to publish the first complete genome for a single human - specifically, genetic entrepreneur Craig Venter - at an estimated cost of $70 million to $100 million. Nobel-winning biologist James Watson's genome was also done up last year at a cost of roughly $1 million.
In the past year, genome-decoding has gone commercial - almost to the point of sparking a price war. A 2-year-old company called 23andMe is offering an analysis of 600,000 key DNA markers for $399 (marked down from $999). Other companies - including deCODEand Navigenics - are in the marker-analysis business as well, with services listed at prices ranging from less than $1,000 to $2,500.
You can get your entire 6-billion-base-pair genome decoded by a 1-year-old company called Knome at a cost of $100,000 (slashed from $350,000). And now Complete Genomics is gearing up to provide whole-genome analysis for $5,000 a pop.
"We are a wholesaler of complete human genomes to a variety of markets," said Cliff Reid, Complete Genomic's chairman, president and chief executive officer.
Jorge Conde, chief executive officer for Knome, noted that the target price for decoding an entire human genome is $1,000. "At or below $1,000 for a genome, this is a technology that will have a significant benefit to individuals and will be widely accessible," he said.
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