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623 points magicalhippo | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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a_bonobo ◴[] No.42621533[source]
There's a market not described here: bioinformatics.

The owner of the market, Illumina, already ships their own bespoke hardware chips in servers called DRAGEN for faster analysis of thousands of genomes. Their main market for this product is in personalised medicine, as genome sequencing in humans is becoming common.

Other companies like Oxford Nanopore use on-board GPUs to call bases (i.e., from raw electric signal coming off the sequencer to A, T, G, C) but it's not working as well as it could due to size and power constraints. I feel like this could be a huge game changer for someone like ONT, especially with cooler stuff like adaptive sequencing.

Other avenues of bioinformatics, such as most day-to-day analysis software, is still very CPU and RAM heavy.

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1. evandijk70 ◴[] No.42621696[source]
This is, at least for now, a relatively small market. Illumina acquired the company manufacturing these chips for $100M. Analysis of a genome in the cloud generally costs below $10 on general purpose hardware.

It is of course possible that these chips enable analyses that are currently not possible/prohibited by cost, but at least for now, this will not be the limiting factor for genomics, but cost of sequencing (which is currently $400-500 per genome)