Ion PGM Sequencer Grant Program for Europe

Introduction

Ion Torrent has extended the Ion Personal Genome Machine (PGM^TM) Sequencer Grant Program to Europe and will award two sequencers to scientists there in the first quarter of 2011. This spring Ion Torrent received hundreds of grant proposals from scientists in North America, and in April two winners were each awarded an Ion PGM sequencer.

Apply for the European Ion PGM Sequencer Grant here.

Two grants will be awarded to European scientists under the program. The Dr. James Watson Healthcare Grant will be awarded to the outstanding proposal that addresses human health, in recognition of Dr. Watson's interest in healthcare issues. The Dr. Gordon Moore Environment Grant will be awarded to the outstanding proposal that addresses environmental, ecological or evolutionary issues, areas of study that the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has long supported.

As part of their grant, each of the winning scientists will receive a perpetual license to the DNASTAR^® SeqMan NGen assembly software and the CLC bio Genomics Workbench bioinformatics software.

The Ion PGM Sequencer Grant Program is designed to foster the development of new applications that leverage the Ion PGM sequencer's unprecedented speed, scalability and low cost. Under the program, applicants fill out a simple grant form-a few hundred words-describing the experiment they would do with an Ion PGM sequencer. The applicants' goal should be to address a problem that was intractable using previous technologies.

The ideal application should:

- Take advantage of the Ion PGM sequencer's ability to do runs in one to two hours

- Take advantage of the Ion PGM sequencer's accessibility: its push-button simplicity, small footprint (about the size of a desktop printer) and affordability (about €50,000 for the instrument, €500 per chip)

- Focus on applications that most benefit from a few million reads of 100 to 200 bases

- Enable a significant adoption of Ion semiconductor sequencing technology

- Lead to an ongoing application of Ion Torrent Technology^TM with a significant societal benefit, such as expanding our understanding of the genetic causes and molecular basis of disease or addressing critical environmental, ecological or evolutionary issues

The Ion PGM sequencer, which will be launched in 2010, uses a new sequencing technology that brings the transformative power of the semiconductor to the life sciences. Ion Torrent technology directly translates chemically encoded information (A, C, G, T) into digital information (0, 1) on a semiconductor chip. This approach marries simple chemistry to proprietary semiconductor technology-it's Watson meets Moore. The result is a sequencing system that is simpler, faster, more cost effective and scalable than any other technology available

The grant submissions will be judged on the merit of their ideas. The judges for the competition are Ion Torrent Founder, Chairman and CEO Dr. Jonathan Rothberg, Dr. Mathias Uhlen, Dr. George Church and the Dr. Svante Pääbo laboratory.

Grant Application Details
The application window will close on November 22, and the Ion PGM sequencer will be delivered to the winners in the first quarter of 2011. The first 50 applicants will receive a free Ion Torrent T-shirt.  Please note that the grant will cover the cost and delivery of an Ion PGM sequencer, but not the cost of reagents or other systems or processes.

Apply for the European Ion PGM Sequencer Grant here.

All products will be subject to Ion Torrent's standard terms and conditions.  View the Ion PGM Sequencer Grant Program terms and conditions.

The successful applicant will participate in educational and marketing programs designed to help the broader research community to understand how the Ion Torrent system works and how they utilized the system in their experiment.

Thank you for your interest and we look forward to the opportunity to be your partner.

Kind Regards,
The Ion Torrent Team
Wes Conard
Director, Corporate Communications
wconard@iontorrent.com

 Apply for the European Ion PGM Sequencer Grant here.