San Diego, Calif.-based Illumina says its newest sequencing platform, the HiSeq X Ten, is the first to break the $1,000 barrier for sequencing a human’s genetic code. It’s a benchmark that many companies have been chasing since the Human Genome Project succeeded in producing the first sequence in 2003 for a mere $3 billion or so. And it’s a figure that has been seen as one of the key steps on the road to making genome sequencing a cost-effective option for widespread medical use.
“This platform was purpose-built to enable large population-scale human genome sequencing,” Joel Fellis, an Illumina senior manager of product marketing, said in a phone interview. “There’s an explosion in demand [for this sort of thing]; we’re approached quite frequently by nations and centers look...
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