Recent MBS Grads Publish Article on NGS Technologies
Two newly minted KGI graduates recently had their article on the cost of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies published. The article, "Contracting Sequencing Costs Could Mean Ballooning Informatics Prices" by Aabha Khemani and Gauri Jaju, both MBS '12, is currently online at GEN: Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News, which offers comprehensive coverage on drug discovery, omics, and bioprocessing, among other topics.
Although NGS was already a "hot topic" at KGI, the pair was encouraged to turn their interest into an article in Ian Phillip's class on Professional and Advanced Writing. "We would not have tried publishing a paper on this if we had not taken his course," Jaju noted. "He really guided us and motivated us to move forward with our analysis and thoughts."
Both interested in cost analysis and motivated to approach the topic of NGS technologies in a unique way, Khemani and Jaju did research and found that although there had been predictions about how the overall costs associated with sequencing will increase, to date not much good analysis had been done. Among their conclusions was that "an increase in personnel requirements, even though the software costs will decrease to some extent, will tremendously add to the interpretation costs per genome. The data handling and downstream processing costs are estimated to almost double in 2017 as compared to 2011."
Khemani explained that in order to reach that conclusion, they contacted a few bioinformatics company to learn about the costs of the software and the services they offer: "We took the average of these costs and reached a final number for 2011. According to Moore's law, the computing cost will decrease at a particular rate every year. Using this rate, we came up with a number for 2017. For personnel recruitment costs, we researched salaries on various websites such as glassdoor and PayScale. From a paper published in the genome biology journal, we came across the additional personnel that will be required in future and considered their FTEs for 2017 cost estimates."
Read the full article here.