Biotech firm sells genome sequencing service on eBay

A US Biotech firm has auctioned its personal genome sequencing service on eBay in a bid to raise money for the X-Prize Foundation - a charitable trust that aims to bring around radical breakthroughs by providing cash prizes to drive innovation. The publicity stunt was launched to raise awareness of personal genomics and mark DNA Day, celebrated on 25 April to commemorate the completion of the Human Genome Project and to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the DNA double helix structure.

Bidding for the service, which is provided by the US Biotech film 'Knome' and normally costs $100,000, began at $68,000. However, when the auction closed last night there were no bids for the product, which also included a face-to-face meeting with Knome's geneticists, clinicians and bioinformaticians to review the winner's sequence data, as well as a private dinner with George Church, co-Founder and Knome's chief scientific advisor.

Backed by US philanthropists, the first X-Prize was awarded in 2004 to the first team to develop a passenger spacecraft. Recognising the potential benefit to human health of fast, affordable genome sequencing technology, the charity has chosen genomics to be its next prize goal. The Archon X-Prize for Genomics will award a $10 million prize to the first company to sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days at a cost of less than $10,000 per genome. But with the cost of DNA sequencing falling fast as sequencing companies compete for the prize, some experts are predicting the prize could be collected this year, perhaps explaining why the $68,000 price tag proved un-alluring.

However, despite the growing number of companies marketing personalised genome sequencing services direct-to-the-consumer, the value of such services remains dubious, writes genome scientist Daniel MacArthur in his blog. 'We know a little about the common small-effect changes associated with common disease risk, but almost all of these can already be captured very effectively with a $399 SNP chip from 23andMe. The value of whole genome sequencing is capturing the rare variants that can't be captured by a SNP chip - but we currently have an extremely limited ability to interpret the functional importance of these variants,' he commented.