Date: Feb 14, 2014 Author: Matthew Herper Source: Forbes (
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by: Matthew Herper
A small company backed by Facebook billionaire Yuri Milner is looking to enter the hot field of DNA sequencing with a device the same size and weight -- and perhaps the same cost -- as a laptop computer.
"We're talking about a DNA sequencer which is the footprint of an iPad and that is very easy to use and incredibly low cost," says Hesaam Esfandyarpour, the 31-year-old founder and chief executive of the company, GenapSys. "The goal would be to make sure that we bring this to the hands of the masses."
That's very different view than that held by Illumina, which generated $1.42 billion in sales last year selling DNA sequencing machines, chemicals, and other tools for researchers. Illumina announced earlier this year that it had reached a long-awaited milestone for biology: the ability to uncode the full DNA sequence of a human being for $1,000. But the machine that will do it costs $1 million, must be sold in groups of ten, and only a handful will be sold next year. It's the center of a DNA sequencing factory; big labs like The Harvard-MIT Broad Institute in Cambridge, and the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Austalia rushed to sing up.
But Esfandyarpour envisions his machines being sold for as little as a few thousand dollars each, with users paying more for the cartridges and chemicals they will need to make them run. But he doesn't have an official price yet. The reason GenapSys is going public is to give scientists early access to its machines. A commercial launch will not come for another year or more. He's describing the technology for the first time at the annual Advances in Genome Biology & Technology Meeting in Marco Island, Fla.
The concept behind the DNA sequencer is similar to that behind the Ion Torrent devices sold by Life Technologies, which is in the process of merging with Thermo Fisher, in that it uses a semiconductor chip. (Esfandyarpour worked on patents that were licensed to that device.) But while the Ion Torrent devices measure ions released as DNA reacts, the GenapSys device measure the electric signal of the DNA molecule itself as it is copied, revealing its code. As with Ion Torrent, Esfandyarpour says there will be multiple chips, with a cost per run of a few hundred dollars each. The first will measure 1 gigabase of DNA, the second 20 gigabases, and the third 100 gigabases, which is the amount of DNA code needed to accurately analyze a human genome.
"It may be a niche where you have a really small device that's priced to be either the cost of a laptop or a footprint of a laptop," says George Church of Harvard University, who is a paid consultant on GenapSys' advisory board. "It's totally affordable it barely even qualifies as equipment. It fills a niche that hasn't been filled by the [Illumina] MiSeq or [Ion Torrent] or the Nanopores yet." And he expresses hope that the cost of sequencing DNA on GenapSys' gear may continue to decrease after the product is launched. Church says he has seen the machines run at GenapSys' headquarters.
Eric Topol of the Scripps Institute, another member of GenapSys' scientific advisory board, was also optimistic. He says the devices weigh only a few pounds, and do well on another measure of importance for DNA sequencing: the read length, or the amount of DNA the machine can read at once. (All sequencers can decode only fragments of the genetic code, which must then be reassembled by supercomputers.)
"We're starting a project doing antibody sequencing in children with diabetes and we couldn't even do it if they didn't have long reads," says Topol. "It could prove to be useful and important over time, but obviously it's in very early stages."
Rick Myers, the President and Director of the HudsonAlpha Institute in Huntsville, Ala., vetted GenapSys for a venture capital fund. "I'm excited about it I think it has real potential," Myers says. "They have to do that and get it into the hands of scientists but the potential is there for them to be a real player in this field."
Genomics researchers have been victims of hype before. Pacific Biosciences, which uses lasers to sequence individual molecules of DNA, vowed to overtake Illumina several years ago. It never did, and has become a niche player for its very long DNA reads. Two years ago, a company called Oxford Nanopore showed off a DNA sequencer the size of a thumb drive, then expected to be available soon. It has not been, but earlier today at the AGBT meeting David Jaffe, a researcher at the Broad, showed data from the device. Researchers were excited, but cautioned that the device may be "error-prone." Isaac Ro, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, said the presentation was a "net positive" for Illumina because it made competition seem less likely.
Esfandyarpour says he doesn't ever think sequencing just a single DNA molecule, as Oxford Nanopore and Pacific Biosciences do, will prove highly accurate; the laws of physics make it too difficult to do. He thinks his approach could be better and cheaper. He's built his machine with $4 million of funding in grants and just under $50 million of venture funds from Facebook billionaire Yuri Milner, DeCheng Capital, IPV Capital. Now he has to prove that it can realize his hopes.
