Start-Up Company To Bring Down Price Of DNA Tests To $5,000

Mountain View, CA (AHN) - Complete Genomics is expected to unveil on Monday its plan to offer in 2009 DNA testing for $5,000, down from the current $100,000.

The start-up company actually has a long-term goal to bring down the cost to $1,000 to help make available to people technology which will help them know their entire DNA sequences which will provide them vital data such as ailments they are predisposed or what drugs would be most effective for them.

While Harvard genetics professor George Church, advisor to Complete Genomics, said the $5,000 offer is a "shockingly low price" cost of DNA testing has gone done the last four years at a rate faster than the drop in prices of computers.

When the company completed its first human genome sequence for the Human Genome Project it was estimated to have spent several hundred million dollars. Last year when the genome sequence of DNA sequence discoverer James Watson was made, the cost was down to $1 million.

Complete Genomics, which got with BioNanomatrix an $8.8 million grant from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology Advanced Technology Program to develop a system which could sequence the entire human genome in eight hours at less than $100, will make the service available to consumer-oriented companies, not to consumers.

According to Clifford Reid, chief executive of Complete Genomics, it hopes to perform 1,000 human genome sequences in 2009 and 20,000 the following year. By 2013 its target is one million. But it is based on an assumption that firm could raise fund to capitalize the project and get partners that will build 10 sequencing centers costing $50 million each.

So far Complete Genomics has raised $46 million from venture capitalists