Oct. 15, 2004 – The National Institutes of Health has awarded $5 million to genomics instrumentation firm 454 Life Sciences to develop a method to sequence individual human genomes on systems the size of a credit card, according to a news release.
The three-year grant from the NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute is designed to reduce the cost of whole mammalian genome sequencing by 100-fold, or to about $100,000 per genome. Branford, Conn.-based 454 Life Sciences, which received a $2.4-million related grant in May from NIH, is developing instruments and picoliter-scale technology for determining the whole genome sequence of entire viral, bacterial and human genomes.