Talk

The race is on: $10 million to the first team that develops the technology to sequence 100 genomes in 10 days.

Today the X Prize Foundation announced the $10M award, which is backed by a wealthy Canadian geologist. Writes Antonio Regalado in the Wall Street Journal,

As an encore, the winning team will be paid $1 million more to decode another 100 people’s genes, including a bevy of wealthy donors and celebrities. Already accepted for future decoding: Google Inc. co-founder Larry Page, Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul G. Allen and former junk-bond king Michael Milken.

The idea behind the star-studded genome race is to drive public interest in DNA research and hasten the age of “personalized medicine,” in which drugs and diets may be tailored to an individual’s genes, says Peter Diamandis, the aerospace entrepreneur who founded the X Prize Foundation, based in Santa Monica, Calif.

I’m taking bets: now how long do you think it will take to reach the $1000 genome?

Technorati Tags: x prize, genomics, human genome, dna, personalized medicine, peter diamandis

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Human Genome. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.