Oh, that is really cool. From the FAQ:<p>>Candidate teams are limited to five members. They must be genomic researchers, entrepreneurs, startups, or early-stage companies from academia or industry that aim to take their promising NGS applications to market.<p>If I were starting a company in the genomics space (maybe someday), I would definitely apply with Illumina. They recently hit a milestone whereby a complete human genome can be sequenced for $1000 [1], which has been a goal for over a decade since it "neatly highlights the chasm between the actual cost of the Human Genome Project, estimated at $2.7 billion over a decade, and the benchmark for routine, affordable personal genome sequencing" [2].<p>This will be one of the more exciting, and yet at the same time terrifying, areas of research and innovation. Personalized medicine is the future of healthcare, but we'll need brilliant, well-intentioned people to lead us there in a way that benefits us while avoiding the numerous ethical challenges along the way.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.illumina.com/systems/hiseq-x-sequencing-system.ilmn" rel="nofollow">http://www.illumina.com/systems/hiseq-x-sequencing-system.il...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1,000_genome" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1,000_genome</a>
Financial support, including $100,000 instrument access (MiSeq® System and NextSeq 500™ System), sequencing reagents, 20% research assistant time, $100,000 convertible notes, and an equity line of $20,000 or more<p>I have no knowledge in this area, any thoughts on this deal by someone who does?
The moonshot is human blood/tissue mRNA sequencing with a 30 minute turnaround for under $100.<p>That requires some insane processing locally to create a gene expression histogram, a secure cloud database to match against other patient data to recommend health markers, and a few terabytes locally of other gene combinations that are known dissease markers to sift through.<p>AIDS, diabetes, cancer, ... any disease detectable by your gene expression levels being out of whack can be diagnosed.
No mention of Yuri Milner on the application page, but just in case anyone overlooks the connection:
<a href="http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2014/02/12/illumina-yuri-milner-start-genomics-startup-accelerator-in-sf/" rel="nofollow">http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2014/02/12/illumina-yur...</a><p>$100,000 for 10% of an idea seems generous vs. most software accelerators. Wonder what they're expecting by loaning out all their equipment in a dedicated research facility?
Are they expecting actual NGS improvements or are they hoping to facilitate non-NGS innovations that merely use NGS as a tool?