Don't take my Kodachrome Away!!!!

Do you remember when you had to send your film to Rochester NY or Ohio to get developed......you would stop by the store check your last name.........Nope......sorry no pictures yet!! Even the thought of keeping that little tear off tag drove me nutty!

It was exciting, but it also was a huge pain in the a$$......What if the pictures were screwed up, you would have to send your negatives back so that they could get run again.........

That being said, Kodachrome is the gold standard of photo film, but that is so 1980s. In fact, there is only one processor of Kodachrome in the entire US left other than Kodak of course......

These guys had a great economy of scale with the processing centers and in fact it made a very nice business model for a while until Kodak discontinued Kodachrome......

Well in a similar type of move Complete Genomics lifts the veil at the AGBT....

and Bloomberg took notice

"Feb. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Complete Genomics, which offers DNA analysis services to drugmakers and other companies, will begin in June to sequence human genomes for $5,000, a far cry from the $2.3 billion the first sequencing cost in 2003."

"The service will be offered to drugmakers, biotechnology companies, and academic centers, said Clifford Reid, chairman and chief executive officer of the closely held Mountain View, California-based company, in a telephone interview. It won’t be available to individuals. "

From GenomeWeb

It is currently building a production genome center in Mountain View, Calif., that is scheduled to be completed this summer. By the time of its service launch this summer, the company plans to increase the output per sequence run to 200 gigabases, and to 600 gigabases by the end of the year. Its data center will host 5,000 processors and 5 petabytes of disk space initially, which will increase to 60,000 cores and 30 petabytes of storage next year.

This certainly is an interesting model.....I will be very curious as to how long this sort of technology stays this way.......say maybe before we invent The Digital Picture equivalent of Genome Scanning......

But, then what their business model entailed made me chuckle.........

“We think this is what the pharma companies have been waiting for,” he said today in a telephone interview. “We’ll be bringing a new customer to the market that’s potentially the biggest customer for DNA sequencing.”

His point was that Complete Genomics will be targeting Pharma and that this was some new model in the game of sequencing.......

I wonder if he had spoken to any of the old time microarray sales people. You see, Affy and the like actually peddled microarrays to Pharma first, BEFORE they sold that technology to the Academic centers........

That is why we have lag time between what pharma knows and what the rest of the world knows in terms of the microarray and GWAS......

So, peddling to people who have money instead of people who beg the government for money is nothing new, nor is pharma a "New Customer to the Market"

What IS a new customer was hinted at in the GenomeWeb article........

Going forward, Complete Genomics plans to provide human genome sequencing services to large genome centers, research centers, and direct-to-consumer companies.

The Sherpa Says: I wonder if LabCorp, Kimball Genetics, Myriad Genetics et.al. are going to be happy with a company essentially destroying their market by providing a Genome Direct to Consumers at a third of the price of one of their tests????? We'll find out in June!!! See you in the Summer.