Exploiting the power of silicon nanoelectronics
In the past 20 years, the sequencing community has succeeded in reducing the cost per genome by a million-fold – from 100,000,000 to 1,000 dollar per genome. Today, the ambitious goal is to further reduce this to 10 dollar per genome.
For genomic medicine, genetic testing will make its way from the lab to the patient’s bedside, with a more compact form factor, and with results in real-time or within a few hours. Deep sequencing tools on the other hand, will enable the search for rare sequences, cells, or infectious agents in a sample. Innovations in this area focus on an increased throughput, lower cost and higher accuracy. Finally, for advanced research, new tools will be developed to study e.g. mosaicism, which is the genomic variation among cells within an individual.
Silicon nanofabrication technology can help in reaching all these goals: reduce the cost and size of genomics equipment while increasing throughput and enabling long-read sequencing, ultimately improving the accuracy of genome assembly.
Imec is an ideal partner to help you exploit the power of silicon technology in your genomics application. Imec’s state-of-the-art 200-mm and 300-mm chip manufacturing fabs are the perfect environment for developing novel sequencing chips that will be at the core of future sequencing solutions.
Imec has a whole set of expertise in house, to innovate the whole workflow: sample preparation, DNA reading and data analysis. Furthermore, this allows for cross-layer optimization, a concept known in the semiconductor industry to gain orders of magnitude in performance, cost and size.
Read this in-depth article on how microfluidics accelerates DNA-analysis.
Some examples of our expertise: