My View: Planning to Buy the Next Generation Sequencing System? Think Hard!
As the genomics fraternity is busy moving into the next phase of personalised medicine, for those thinking of investing in a next generation sequencing (NGS) have to make hard decisions on which one to choose from. Thankfully there are only 3 platforms dominating the market at the moment (perhaps one or two in the pipeline).
Arguably, the leader of the pack (based on the number of systems bought) would be the Illumina HiSeq system. It has probably the most reads (Gigabases per day and run) and the lowest cost per Megabases (Mb) on all platforms. The latest HiSeq 2500 system can set you back about RM3.5 million but it dominates the market at the moment. There is then the PacBio system which has the amazing capability of the longest available read length (~10kb and increasing each month!). The PacBio performs single molecule real-time sequencing with a short instrument run time but is in the same cost range as the HiSeq. Last but not least is the Ion Proton (currently at the Proton-I-chip) system.
This is a moderately low-cost instrument but does not have the same throughput at the previous two mentioned. UMBI hosted Dr. Steve Turner, the CTO of PacBio who gave a lecture titled ‘Sequencing the unsequenceable’ at UMBI on the 20th March 2014. My view on this is that, before buying, think of capital cost, cost per run, error and accuracy issues, upgrade issues, computation and data storage needs, and last but not least the maintenance cost. The maintenance cost for this equipments run into hundreds of thousands hence the best set-up for an NGS in Malaysia is probably that of a core facility. Let’s look forward to the USD1000 per genome which is said to be coming soon!
(Professor Datuk Dr. Rahman Jamal)