Sequencing costs come down, while patients’ wait continues
This article was originally published in Scrip
Executive Summary
Last Monday, the publication of a letter in Nature Biotechnology described the first “single-molecule sequencing of an individual human genome”, using a third-generation sequencing instrument by Helicos. While the sequencing of a whole human genome per se is no longer extraordinary, it is generally agreed that to make a patient’s DNA data available for a personalised medicine approach, the effort, time and money invested in sequencing a single person’s genome need to come down considerably.