Steve, thanks for posting the link to the Economist article. According to the article the ways to make money include:
Place your bets
One thing that both participants have been keen to emphasise is that the "raw" sequence data itself will be available for nothing. The new firm plans to "package" its data in market-friendly ways, with software to help search and collate it. There will be a range of products, from simple, low-end packages for impoverished academics to tailor-made luxury items for drug companies.obviously this makes PKN the money not AFFX, etc.
There will also be a particular concentration on the genetic differences (known as polymorphisms) between individuals. The high-throughput methods the new firm is adopting mean that several different human genomes will eventually be sequenced. Tracking down polymorphisms should therefore be easy. And polymorphisms are worth money. Some can help in diagnosing diseases, others in understanding their causes. It is even possible that some will lead eventually to drugs... This is where AFFX should make something, I expect, and, IMO, the sooner the genome is completed the better for everyone.
The third hope for making money is to identify a few useful genes that have not already been snapped up by the other genome companies using EST. These companies claim that they have already tracked down 80-90% of the genes, but some valuable ones might still be hiding.again, this may make most of the money for PKN.
I believe that the companies that will be hurt most will be those that are doing sequencing by hybridization for the sequencing information alone.
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