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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there's some way to do testing on a walk-in basis, in a way that would allow transparency re the lack of sample and data retention.

So a customer walks in, provides a sample, and walks out with data on a thumb drive. And perhaps also with the module that was used for the analysis.

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That would obviously more expensive than the $100 sequencing a lot of people are looking for, but for very privacy conscious people this could be available right now with a MinION[0] that's already in the $1000-2000 range, if you really want to take the whole device with you.

[0]: https://nanoporetech.com/products/minion

Wow, that's better than I expected! So maybe a resale market could develop on Craigslist or whatever. Buy one, get your data, clean and wipe it thoroughly, and then resell it. Maybe the refurbished price would stabilize at $500 or whatever.

There are some caveats with that though (some of which I just found out after some digging):

- You'll probably need more than one flow cell (which is used up during sequencing) for a human genome

- The flow cells make up the bulk of the price, costing ~$800 in single unit quantities

- You have to send in used flow cells for refurbishing (which is how they can make them as cheap)

So the $1000 is more or less already the refurbished price.

I wonder how fast the flow cell price will drop. But even at $1000 I might be tempted, except that I'm so damn old, and never (as far as I know) had any kids.

While it mostly comes out to the same, I doubt the price will drop much, but rather they will release a newer iteration of flow cells with slower degradation or more redundancy.

There also doesn't seem to be any significant competition, as Oxford Nanopore has a very broad patent portfolio surrounding their tech.

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