As our technological world advances, one area of science that is trying hard to keep up is the biotech sector, especially when talking about working on human DNA and genome projects. For the most part, machines that do this kind of scientific work are thought to be so cost prohibitive that work gets slowed down by costs and the amount of staff it takes to actually run a project like decoding a genome. That appears about ready to change as biotech company Life Technologies Corp. says it has developed a machine that will decode DNA in just under a day at a cost of just $1,000.
Life Technologies Corp. says that it has begun taking orders for this particular machine, which it expects to begin shipping later in the year. The company says that it has already had three different organizations, Baylor and Yale schools of medicine as well as the Broad Institute of Cambridge, put in an order for the machine that is expected to cost around $149,000 per unit.
Life Technologies' machine is a sequencer, meaning that it allows scientists to break down the sequence of the 3 billion building blocks that make up a human being's DNA. Originally, the process of doing this was ridiculously expensive, but the science community has been working hard to drive the costs down. This particular $1,000 price tag has long been one that has been cited as needed to make it practical for doctors to use this technology in treating their patients. This sequencer could help reveal proclivities to certain diseases or help map out a specific treatment.
Of course, with any kind of new technology in the medical and biotechnological field, there are going to be some doubts as to whether it can work as efficiently and as cost effectively as claimed. Robert Gibbs, who is the director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor, is cautiously optimistic. “We will see if the machines really perform as well as described.” Gibbs did add that if the machine can measure up it would be something to be quite pleased about.
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Edited by
Jennifer Russell
