Henry Ford kept lowering the price of cars, and more people kept buying them. The San Diego–based gene sequencing company Illumina has been doing something similar with the tools needed to interpret the human genetic code.

A record 228,000 human genomes will be completely sequenced this year by researchers around the globe, said Francis de Souza, president of Illumina, the maker of machines for DNA sequencing, during MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

De Souza said Illumina’s estimates suggest that the number will continue to double about every 12 months, reaching 1.6 million genomes by 2017, as the technology shifts from a phase of collapsing prices to expanding use in medicine.

The price of sequencing a single genome has dropped from the $3 billion spent by the original Human Genome Project 13 years ago to as little as $1,000, he said.

During an interview, De Souza questioned whether the price would keep falling at that rate. “It’s not clear you can get another order of magnitude out of this,” he said. Instead, he said, his company’s focus is now on making DNA studies more widespread in hospitals, police labs, and other industries.

“The bottleneck now is not the cost—it’s going from a sample to an answer,” De Souza said. “People are saying the price is not the issue.”

Illumina’s sequencing machines, which cost as much as $1 million each, are unmatched in their speed and accuracy. But the company’s growth has rested sometimes precariously on two curves. One has been the collapsing price of sequencing. The other is the soaring demand from genome scientists and funding agencies.

During the EmTech conference, De Souza said Illumina’s success was due to a “hard pivot” the company made in 2006, when it got into the DNA sequencing business by acquiring Solexa, a U.K. startup, and bet its fortunes “on a technology with no sales, that no one knew if it would work.”

That bet succeeded spectacularly, with Illumina machines now accounting for more than 90 percent of all DNA data produced. Last year, Illumina sold $1.4 billion worth of equipment, chemicals, and tests, about 25 percent more than the year before.

But De Souza says Illumina is now pivoting again. This time, its big bet is that DNA sequencing will become routine in medicine, not just in research labs. To make sure that happens, he said, the company is investing in simplifying its technology, winning FDA approval for more diagnostic tests doctors could order directly, developing ways to store DNA data in the cloud, and even launching a DNA app store. “The big pivot now is to the clinic. Getting there will change everything that we do,” he said.

For now, most DNA sequencing is still done by science labs. Of the 228,000 genomes Illumina estimates will be sequenced this year, more than 80 percent are part of scientific research projects, De Souza said. Those include a plan that the U.K.’s government is undertaking to decode 100,000 genomes over several years.

Source: www.technologyreview.com