Complete Genomics said this week that it will be paid $1.1 million, or $11,000 per genome, to sequence and analyze 50 pediatric tumor-normal pairs for a National Cancer Institute-led study that is funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
The company previously disclosed the order in its registration statement for an initial public offering filed last month with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. According to the filing, Complete received the order in May from SAIC-Frederick, the main contractor for the NCI's R&D facility in Frederick, Md., and will sequence the 100 genomes over a six-month period. SAIC then has the option to have the company analyze the genomes of more than 500 additional tumor-normal pairs over an 18-month period (IS 8/3/2010).
This week, Complete Genomics said that the project is part of an NCI initiative called Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments, which seeks to use genomic technologies to rapidly identify therapeutic targets in childhood cancers. The TARGET project currently focuses on acute lymphoblastic leukemia, acute myeloid leukemia, neuroblastoma, osteosarcoma, and Wilms tumor.
Complete Genomics will seek to identify and validate mutations in the tumor genomes, including SNPs, insertions and deletions, and copy number variations. It expects to submit the sequence data as well as the assembled and validated data sets to the National Center for Biotechnology Information's Sequence Read Archive database and the TARGET database.
Last month, the company said that as of mid-July, it had sequenced 200 humans this year, and had an order backlog of more than 500 genomes.