100 genomes, 10 days and 10 million dollars

The US-based X Prize Foundation has launched an audacious competition to find a private company that can successfully map 100 human genomes in just 10 days. The winner will receive US$10 million (AU$13.75m).

In 1996 the foundation offered a similar prize, the Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight. It was named after Iranian-American businesswoman Anousheh Ansari, who recently returned from a nine-day, privately funded space flight to the International Space Station.

The Ansari prize was won in 2004 by Mojave Aerospace Ventures, a team led by aircraft designer Burt Rutan and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Their winning entry, SpaceShipOne, is now the prototype for a new class of sub-orbital vessel.

The genomics challenge has been named the Archon X Prize after a multi-million dollar donation by Dr Stewart Blusson, president of minerals company Archon. A foundation spokesman said the prize was designed to usher in a new era of personalised preventative medicine and stimulate new avenues of research and development of medical sciences.

On hand at a press conference yesterday to launch the competition were Dr Francis Collins, director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute and Dr Craig Venter, chairman of the J Craig Venter Institute. This public-private odd couple led the race to map the human genome during the Human Genome Project.

Physicist Stephen Hawking sent a message applauding the competition, saying it was the work done by the X Prize Foundation that would eventually "unleash humanity from the gravitational bonds of earth".

"I am suffering from what is known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) ... which is thought to have a genetic component to its origin," Hawking said. "It is for this reason that I am a supporter of the $10m Archon X Prize for Genomics to drive rapid human genome sequencing.

"This prize and the resulting technology can help bring about an era of personalised medicine. It is my sincere hope that the Archon X Prize for Genomics can help drive breakthroughs in diseases like ALS at the same time that future X Prizes for space travel help humanity to become a galactic species."

The foundation was established by Dr Peter Diamandis, a space travel entrepreneur with an undergraduate degree in molecular genetics and graduate degree in aerospace engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He also has a medical degree from Harvard.

In 1987, Diamandis co-founded the International Space University (ISU), where he served as the university's first managing director. Today he serves as a trustee of the ISU, which is based in Strasbourg, France. He is the CEO of Zero Gravity Corporation, a commercial space company, chairman and co-founder of the Rocket Racing League, and a co-founder and director of Space Adventures, the company which brokered the launches of four private citizens to the International Space Station.

"The X Prize Foundation has created a unique philanthropic prize model designed to stimulate research and accelerate development of radical breakthroughs that will benefit humanity," Diamandis said in a statement. "The Archon X Prize for Genomics will revolutionise personalised medicine and custom medical treatment, forever changing the face of medical research and making genome sequencing affordable and available in every hospital and medical care facility in the world."

Three teams have already signed up for the competition. Texas company VisiGen Biotechnologies is currently developing a new method of sequencing DNA that it hopes will completely sequence a human genome in a day for the long-coveted target mark of $1000.

Connecticut-based 454 Life Sciences has developed a sequencer that can produce tens of millions of raw bases per hour on a single instrument. The 454 Sequencer is currently being used by scientists at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig to sequence the complete Neanderthal genome.

The third team is made up of the Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology, the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution and Firebird Biomolecular Sciences.