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Sony gets into genetic analysis with aim of helping docs pick better treatments
We tend to forget that many companies celebrated for their shiny things also have significant interest in health care; everyone gets sick, after all. Sony is one of this gang, producing medical-grade equipment and the like under its own name, as well as buying up and investing in outfits that have other, specific expertise. Starting February 2014, Sony will also become part owner of P5, a new venture that'll provide human genome analysis in Japan, which just happens to be one of the world's largest pharmaceutical/biotechnology markets. With help from M3, which Sony's invested in, and DNA specialists Illumina, P5's quest is also to marry genetic data with other info, like medical histories, to make headway in the area of personalized medicine (where therapies are selected for the individual, not just the affliction). We doubt Kaz Hirai will be heavily involved, aside from his efforts to find the "Xbox fanboy gene" and any way to silence it, of course. Dan Cooper contributed his image manipulations skills to this report.
This machine can sequence your DNA for just $1,000
Even a decade ago, sequencing a genetic code would set you back around $250,000. The target, of course, has been to crunch that figure down to a more reasonable sum, and now a company believes that it can do it for just $1,000 a go. Illumina Inc. has announced that the $10 million HiSeq X Ten kit will crank out tens of thousands of genomes per year. Even better, is that the $1,000 figure includes the hefty price for the hardware -- which is hoped will kickstart a new era of genetic research. Naturally, the first customers include the Harvard-MIT Broad institute and Regeneron, with the latter planning to use the tech to develop cheap new drugs to heal our ailing bodies.
