History and Major Achievements
454 Life Sciences was founded by Jonathan Rothberg originally as 454 Corporation, a subsidiary of CuraGen Corporation. For their method for low-cost gene sequencing, 454 Life Sciences were awarded the Wall Street Journal's Gold Medal for Innovation in the Biotech-Medical category in 2005. The name 454 was the code name by which the project was referred to at CuraGen and the numbers have no special meaning.
In late March, 2007, Roche Diagnostics announced an agreement to purchase 454 Life Sciences for US$154.9 million. It will remain a separate business unit.
In November 2006, Rothberg, Michael Egholm, and colleagues at 454 published a cover article with Svante Paabo in Nature describing the first million base pairs of the Neanderthal genome, and initiated the Neanderthal Genome Project to complete the sequence of the Neanderthal genome by 2009.
In May 2007, Project "Jim", a project initiated by Rothberg and 454 Life Sciences to determine the first sequence of an individual was completed after sequencing the genome of James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.
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