Company Profile:

FfAME provides an innovative environment to host the scientific and technological research of a small group of selected computational, molecular and life scientists, who can combine physical and organic chemistry, molecular and structural biology, systems biology, cell biology, organismic biology, ecology, evolutionary biology, paleontology, geology, astrobiology and planetary science to create a vertically integrated science for the current century with the opportunity to transfer technology from basic research to meet opportunities in commerce and medicine.

Description of Proposed Sequencing Methodology:

The Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, the Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology, and Firebird Biomolecular Sciences LLC have joined the challenge to generate a platform to allow routine re-sequencing of individual human genomes. The goal is to inexpensively personalize the medical care of individual patients. The joint approach is chemistry-oriented, not instrument-oriented, recognizing the history of the past 50 years that shows that "if you build the chemistry, the hardware will follow".

In platforms developed by Chiron and Bayer, chemistry from consortium scientists has already supported genomic approaches that personalize the care of over 400,000 patients annually infected with HIV, hepatitis B, and hepatitis C viruses, evolutionary analysis to assess the function of specific gene families, and chemistry that supports multiplexed sequence analysis. Further, the consortium exploits evolutionary analysis of primate genomes to decide which segments need not be re-sequenced to support personalized medicine; not all parts of the human genome are equally important.

Team Quote:

The Archon X PRIZE is an interesting "grand challenge". It is different, however, from the Ansari X PRIZE, which had a well-specified goal (to reproduce in the private sector an accomplishment made 40 years earlier in the public sector). In contrast, the Archon X PRIZE does not have a well-specified goal. For example, we do not know today what "98% coverage" means when aggregating 10 billion bytes of discrete information describing organic molecular structures. Further, "errors" come in many types, some significant, others less so, and some indicating that we do not fully understand what "error" means in a diploid organism that generates somatic tissues with imperfect replication.

Thus, the Archon X PRIZE goal specifications do not yet sit squarely atop the actual task at hand: to apply genomics to medicine, for the purpose of improving human health in the most economic way.

We expect, however, that the specifications of the Archon X PRIZE will evolve over the next few months so that they are congruent to the task at hand.