A substantial portion of this Council meeting is devoted to the large
scale sequencing program. New technologies are affording
rapidly-changing opportunities. The following is a brief status report
on commercialization of new sequencing technologies, many of which have
received grant support from NHGRI. Information sources include company
press releases, articles that have appeared on GenomeWeb
(http://www.genomeweb.com/), webcasts of the JP Morgan Healthcare
Conference held January 7-10, 2008, and NIH grants data.

**454 Life Sciences Corporation/Roche Diagnostics** released its
original sequencing system in 2005 and the upgraded GS FLX system in
2007. 454 announced on November 6, 2007, that over 100 peer-reviewed
studies have been published that use the company's Genome Sequencer
System. NHGRI provided \$7.3 million in grant support to 454.

**Illumina, Inc**. acquired Solexa on January 16, 2007, which had
previously released the Solexa sequencer. On October 23, 2007, Illumina
announced that over 100 Genome Analyzers had been shipped since the
product\'s inception. More recently they stated that they have sold and
shipped more than 200 systems. (No NHGRI support.)

**Applied Biosystems** provided an early access program for the SOLiD™
System in June 2007, and announced commercial availability of the system
at the ASHG meeting on October 24, 2007. Numbers of instruments sold
have not been announced publicly. The SOLiD system was initially
developed by Agencourt Biosciences, which received \$5.6 million in
grant support from NHGRI for this project.

**Helicos Biosciences Corp** announced on November 1, 2007, that it has
commercial grade instruments in various stages of assembly and test. In
early January 2008, nine HeliScope sequencers were on the manufacturing
floor in various stages of production and testing; the firm did not have
orders for the system at that time. NHGRI provided funds for single
molecule sequencing research in Dr. Stephen Quake's laboratory (\$2.8
million), which in part underlies the Helicos technology. Helicos
currently has an NHGRI grant to support technology development (\$2
million).

**Danaher Motion's Dover Instrument** is assembling sequencing
instruments in a collaboration with George Church's lab at Harvard Med
School, and in December anticipated shipping some of those instruments
soon. The multipurpose instrument would support biochemistries for
"polony" sequencing being developed by Church's lab. NHGRI supports a
CEGS led by Dr. Church that is focused on the development and
applications of polony sequencing (\$10 million).

**Affymetrix Inc**. announced on December 18, 2007, that it will acquire
USB Corporation to expand its line of genetic analysis solutions. In
January, Affymetrix explained that the acquisition will help in the
deployment of enzymatic sequencing reactions on arrays using both
polymerase and ligase labeling reactions. (No direct NHGRI support.)

**Sequenom, Inc.** announced in September 2007 plans to develop
technology for high throughput genotyping, DNA sequencing and other
nucleic acids assays, using nanopore-base single DNA molecule optical
probing. The technology underpinnings are provided by the research
conducted in the laboratory of Amit Meller, currently at Boston
University, who has received \$1.4 million in support from NHGRI's
sequencing technology program.