That's the goal of a West Philadelphia start-up called BioNanomatrix Inc. that believes it has the technology and expertise to sequence an entire individual human genome faster and cheaper than can be done now.

Current technology, which takes about two months and costs $1 million, chops DNA material into bits and pieces and studies it, reassembling it like a massive puzzle using a complex computer. The process is both time-consuming and expensive.

BioNanomatrix's technology - a tiny silicon "nano" chip - permits whole strands of DNA to remain intact through analysis. The strands are "read" and imaged without being broken, like sentences in a book.

The serendipitous story of seven-person BioNanomatrix, which recently landed an $8.8 million federal grant and is about to close its first venture-capital financing, begins with molecular biologist Han Cao.

A post-doctorate fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's gene-therapy center, Cao left Penn in 2000 to join the electrical-engineering department at Princeton University.

There, he worked with engineers pushing the frontiers of nanofabrication, making miniature devices - no bigger than one-sixteenth the size of a small pinkie fingernail - that are the domain of the semiconductor industry.

Cao and the Princeton team developed a "nano channel array" chip that holds reams of information in more than a mile of tiny channels, or tunnels - not just the 46 chromosomes of one person's DNA, but the entire DNA of 200 people, on a single chip.

With a background in biology and genetics, Cao saw the chip's potential for genetic analysis and for decoding the human genome. In late 2003, he left his junior research-associate post at Princeton, licensed the technology from Princeton, and founded the company.

"I always wanted to be an entrepreneur," said Cao, 39. "I basically worked out of Internet cafes in Philadelphia. I didn't have money for anything. It was just myself in a virtual mode."

Cao pitched the technology to investors and, in 2004, raised $400,000 from a wealthy angel investor in Alabama. He also met Michael Boyce-Jacino, a molecular geneticist and former chief scientific officer at Orchid BioSciences in Princeton.

Persuaded by the science and Cao's entrepreneurial bent, Boyce-Jacino, who had experience starting a company, taking it public and raising money - $200 million in the case of Orchid - signed on as BioNanomatrix's president and chief executive officer.

"We have absolutely astounding technology," Boyce-Jacino said, in the company offices at the Science Center at 37th and Market Streets. "We have the brainpower and innovation capabilities that we need. We are building partnerships for commercialization that are essential, and we are bringing in money that's necessary to reduce it to practice."

BioNanomatrix has purposely stayed under the radar until now, raising money: $250,000 from Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania and $900,000 in National Institutes of Health funding and other federal grants.