Re:23andme: Evil Or The Way Of The Future?
by rms on Saturday November 17, 2007 @12:00PM
(#80955)
$999 is way cheap for 23andme to be selling this, the microarrays cost $650 each before they are analyzed. As per a Techcrunch comment, I suspect they are subsidizing or selling below cost which will probably work out because of the rapidly falling costs in this area.
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Re:23andme: Evil Or The Way Of The Future?
by aswanson on Saturday November 17, 2007 @08:02PM
(#81058)
What materials are those arrays built out of? Do they require any special (laser trimmed) components? Special lithography? I smell an industry ripe to be commoditized by a startup.
I'm not sure what it actually takes to manufacture them -- there's definitely some lithography that goes into it but I don't know much beyond that. You might be able to convert an existing microprocessor plant into a DNA microarray plant but i don't really know.
This is the one that I believe 23andme is purchasing in bulk -- or, at least it is the highest end microarray sold by the company 23andme gets their arrays from. http://www.illumina.com/pagesnrn.ilmn?ID=70