Ion Torrent Systems Inc. has developed a DNA sequencing technique expected to be low cost, portable and scalable, in order to target the $1,000 genome, an article published in Nature magazine has highlighted.
The Guilford, Conn.-based company uses semiconductors to conduct the DNA sequencing rather than more expensive and complex optical technology.
Ion was founded by Jonathan Rothberg, a chemical and biomedical engineer who also created well-known life sciences companies such as 454 Life Sciences Corp., CuraGen Corp. and Raindance Technologies.
“The seminal importance of DNA sequencing to the life sciences, biotechnology and medicine has driven the search for more scalable and lower-cost solutions,” Rothberg and his colleagues wrote in the article.
“We have a new type of sequencing method, and we can do sequencing from microbial to human,” Maneesh Jain, Ion’s vice president of marketing and business development, said of Nature’s decision to publish a paper on the technology, which already is on the market. Jain said that nonetheless, the article is a seminal paper.
Ion’s $50,000 PGM product uses a massively parallel array of proprietary semiconductor sensors to directly measure, in real-time, the hydrogen ions produced during DNA replication. The product’s chips contain a high-density array of wells that can handle millions of reactors while reagents flow over a sensor array. Jain said with semiconductors, sequencing can be done in a couple hours instead of two to eight weeks.
“China and Germany used PGM to sequence the E. coli during the recent outbreak,” he said. “In the past, if you looked at the progression of an outbreak, it took a while to identify it. Here, we identified what it was in the first three days, and they were able to do something about it.” Another application is to sequence gene mutations related to disease.
Jain said the product is used in hundreds of labs in 40 countries. The company just launched a product with a 10-fold throughput improvement over its predecessor, and it is working to launch another product with another 10-fold improvement in the next six months.
As a result, the company also has almost doubled its employee count over the last six months to more than 200. Ion was acquired by Life Technologies Corp. of Carlsbad, Calif., in 2010.
Ion Torrent is one of the New England companies – along with GnuBIO Inc. of Cambridge, Helicos BioSciences Corp. also of Cambridge, and NABsys Inc. of Providence, R.I. – , that is in the race to complete a genome for $1,000.
“Sequencing on an ion semiconductor chip makes the $1,000 genome both inevitable and predictable. Extrapolating from our current progress we will break the $1,000 genome barrier in 2013,” Rothberg said, in an email response to queries from Mass High Tech. “The development of ion semiconductor sequencing will have as profound an effect on sequencing as the introduction of CMOS imagers had on the development of digital photography, or the introduction of the microprocessor had on computing — it will make sequencing ubiquitous, fast and low cost.”
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