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Sequencing projects bring age-old wisdom to genomics

Cross posted from Nature Medicine’s Spoonful of Medicine blog.

Helen ‘Happy’ Reichert died in September. She was a lifelong New Yorker, a former television talk show host and Cornell University’s oldest alumna. She was 109. Despite her death, however, Reichert’s memory may live on through her genome sequence.

Today, the nonprofit X-Prize Foundation — best known for its attempt to spur the development of private spaceships — launched a $10 million competition to accurately sequence 100 genomes from 100 centenarians over the course of one month, starting 3 January 2013.

According to Craig Venter, who sits on the X-Prize advisory board, next-generation sequencing technologies such as those from Illumina and 454 Life Sciences make systematic errors and are unsuitable for medical applications. The X-Prize, he hopes, will spur development of speedy so-called ‘third generation’ technologies that can compare with the accuracy of first-gen Sanger sequencing at a fraction of the cost. “My genome is the only one sequenced with Sanger sequencing,” Venter told Nature Medicine. “What we’re doing now is taking it to the next stage.”

The announcement really marks a refocusing of the Archon Genomics X-Prize, which was first created in 2006 but netted no winners under a scheme that required sequencing 100 genomes in ten days at a cost of less than $10,000 per genome. The new competition which includes a partnership with pharmacy benefit manager Medco, has lowered the cost per genome to $5,000 and requires an accuracy of no more than one error per 100,000 bases.

Read the rest of this post on Spoonful of Medicine.

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