Hewlett-Packard Co may be a $20,000m a year computer company, but the other $5,000m of non-computer business ain’t hay, and computer technologies and techniques are rapidly infiltrating the company’s instruments, medical equipment and measuring systems – and now the company wants to become a major supplier of equipment to the biomedical market. It has joined forces with the Palo Alto-based Affymetrix Inc offshoot of Affymax NV to build a new generation of dioxyribonucleic acid or DNA-sequencing machines. Affymetrix has developed a technique for doing the analysis quickly and cheaply, using a laser scanner that reads gene samples spread onto integrated circuits. Hewlett will make the scanner, which according to Dow Jones & Co is about the size of a microwave oven, while Affymetrix will make the disposable chips. The Hewlett-Packard device would identify mutations in known genes, making disease diagnoses in a doctor’s surgery or handling comparative tasks in a research laboratory in a matter of minutes. The two companies are not saying when the machine will be available, or how much it will cost, but 18 months is thought likely, and it is expected to cost much less than the $65,000 sequencers now cost.
