Illumina Announces $5,000 Genome Pricing
By Bio-IT World Staff
May 9, 2011 | Illumina announced today that it is lowering the price for sequencing whole human genomes through its service network, the Illumina Genome Network (IGN). The new list price for the service is $5,000 per genome for orders of ten samples or more, and just $4,000 for projects of 50 samples or more.
“We have been very pleased with the success of IGN since its introduction and with how well it has been received by the community,” said Christian Henry, Illumina’s senior VP and general manager, life sciences. “Researchers around the world value the rapid turnaround times, high data quality and accessible price points. Recent advancements in HiSeq technology push that value even further and demonstrate our commitment to continuing to lower cost and drive scale through sequencing technology advancements.”
IGN is a global service partnership that links researchers interested in conducting large-scale whole human genome projects with leading institutions that can perform such projects using Illumina sequencers. Since its introduction in July 2010, Illumina says it has received orders for more than 1,000 samples from various academic and commercial institutions.Illumina expects that the new pricing will enable customers to expand their study sizes, increase the depth of sequencing coverage -- especially for tumor samples -- and drive further adoption of whole-genome sequencing as the preferred method for assessing variation across genomes.
The price drop intensifies competition in the genome service industry, in which offerings from Complete Genomics and China’s BGI loom large.