Coming Soon to a Hospital Near You?

A new Massachusetts-based startup company called Noblegen is trying to make a simpler version of nanopore genome sequencing technology, with the hope of making it cheap and fast enough for widespread use in clinical labs, reports Technology Review's Katherine Bourzac. The company's CEO Frank Feist says Noblegen's goal is to sequence at a rate of 50 base pairs per second, and that the technology could be scaled up to sequence about 30 genomes in 15 minutes, Bourzac adds. Noblegen's technology uses optical imaging to identify the bases, which may led to simpler instrumentation. "Feist says Noblegen's goal is to aggressively drive down the cost and increase the speed of sequencing whole genomes to a point where it makes economic sense for hospital labs in the next decade or so," Bourzac says.