Aaron Kuan

Ten years after the completion of the Human Genome Project, says Aaron Kuan, the real promise of genomics—personalized medicine based on an individual’s unique DNA makeup—has yet to be fulfilled.

“When people think of sequencing, they sometimes think you can run your genome through a machine, get the whole sequence, and understand everything,” he says. “But that’s not happening yet. We don’t have enough sequencing power to fully understand what’s going on.”

Kuan hopes that his own work will help produce a method of single-molecule DNA sequencing that is reliable, quick, and cheap, for use on-site in clinics and hospitals. He is focusing on nanopore sequencing, in which DNA is threaded through a hole small enough to be measured in nanometers (a billionth of a meter). Nanopore sequencing based on biological pores — genetically engineered from bacteria and bacteriophages — has led the field so far, but Kuan thinks that solid state nanopores manufactured from silicon wafers, graphene, and other materials, may ultimately be more promising.

“While you always want to understand how something can work,” he says, “the question becomes, How can I optimize it? How can I make this the most reliable, most tunable, cheapest kind of technology? If we want to make technology that can be mass-produced, we’re going to want to base it on solid state nanotechnology.”