What Inspired this X PRIZE?

In 2000, Dr. J. Craig Venter led the first private team to successfully sequence a complete human genome. In the preceding decades combined governmental and private funding efforts spent $100s of millions to develop the instrumentation required. It took the Venter team $100 million and nine months to achieve their historic accomplishment.

The J. Craig Venter Science Foundation offered the $500,000 Innovation in Genomics Science and Technology Prize in September 2003 aimed at stimulating development of less expensive and faster sequencing technology. To attract even more resources to this exceptionally worthy goal, Dr. Venter joined forces with the X PRIZE Foundation, wrapping his competition and prize purse into the Archon X PRIZE for Genomics.

We now invite anyone, anywhere, from any discipline to accept this grand challenge and work towards a revolutionary breakthrough in human genome sequencing.

The Competition Guidelines

The purpose of this X PRIZE competition is to develop radically new technology that will dramatically reduce the time and cost of sequencing genomes, and accelerate a new era of predictive and personalized medicine. The X PRIZE Foundation aims to enable the development of low-cost diagnostic sequencing of human genomes.

The preliminary guidelines for the competition have been written with this intent and will be further developed and interpreted by the X PRIZE Foundation towards this end.

The $10 million X PRIZE for Genomics prize purse will be awarded to the first Team that can build a device and use it to sequence 100 human genomes within 10 days or less, with an accuracy of no more than one error in every 100,000 bases sequenced, with sequences accurately covering at least 98% of the genome, and at a recurring cost of no more than $10,000 per genome.

If more than one Team attempts the competition at the same time, and more than one Team fulfills all the criteria, then Teams will be ranked according to the time of completion. No more than three teams will be ranked and will share the purse in the following manner: $7.5 million to the winner and $2.5 million to the second place team if two teams are successful, or $7 million, $2 million and $1 million if three teams are successful.

Actual competition events will take place twice a year with all eligible teams given the opportunity to make an attempt, starting at precisely the same time as the other teams.

For more information please see the Competition Guidelines.