May 31 Quick Takes: Ultima emerges with $600M, low-cost sequencing platform

Ultima Genomics Inc. emerged from stealth with $600 million in funding and a platform that enables whole-genome sequencing for $100, about a six-fold cost reduction compared with existing methods. The company's hardware avoids complicated fluidics by using an open substrate instead of the flow cells used by most next-generation sequencing instruments, and its spinning circular wafers enable efficient reagent use and high-speed scanning of large surfaces while minimizing crosstalk. Investors include General Atlantic, Andreessen Horowitz, D1 Capital, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed, Marius Nacht, aMoon, Playground Global and Founders Fund. Ultima has tested its technology with academic partners — including researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, The Whitehead Institute, Stanford University, Cancer Research UK and Baylor College of Medicine — who will present data from those studies at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) conference in Florida next week.

The shrinking cost of whole-genome sequencing could advance the shift from binary markers to mutational signatures for patient stratification and drug matching in cancer...