Ready or Not: Here Comes the Post-Genomic Era

“Just try to sit back and relax,” says the doctor. “I’m going to examine your genome.” You nervously hand him your security key, granting access to the very blueprints to your fragile existence.

Take a short trip into the future and you’ll probably find that going to the doctor is a very different experience, according to Jonathan O’Halloran, Biosciences Director for ‘Opaldia’, the first private genetic medicine company in the UK.

“You’ll get people walking around with the access code to their genome on their flash drive,” says O’Halloran, beginning to wax lyrical about the post-genomic era. “So instead of sending your blood off, your doctor’ll be able to download your genome right onto his computer. And if you can gauge your future health status, then you can plan for the future and I think that’s very, very important,” he adds.

Completed in 2003, the project to read the complete set of instructions that makes a human being – the human genome – plunged the world into a period known as the ‘post-genomic era’. Even today, four years on, sequencing a human genome is still an expensive and time consuming process. But this could all be about to change as scientists go head-to-head in a biotechnology arms race.

The Human Genome X-Prize

“There’s that X Prize out there. Whoever can sequence one hundred genomes, at $10,000 a go, in 10 days gets the $10 million prize,” says O’Halloran. “At the moment it’s looking like a five year development timescale, although a number of key targets still have to be met.”

And this isn’t the first time that science has had an ‘X Prize’. Announced in 1996, the ‘X Prize’ was the brainchild of a group of US philanthropists who realised they could make their lifelong dream of travelling into space a reality by offering a multi-million dollar prize to the first team who could build a personal space rocket; a feat miraculously accomplished by Mojave Aerospace Ventures within a decade.

Now, recognising the potentially awesome benefit to human health of fast, affordable genome sequencing technology, the X-Prize Foundation has chosen genomics to be it's next prize goal. But will genomics research really unearth the ultimate in disease prevention? Not all are so convinced..