Most sequencing platform companies made their big announcements ahead of AGBT, including MGI. However, MGI hinted that there would be more to come in 2023, and it turns out AGBT is recapturing at least a little bit of its former glory of being THE place to make a big announcement. MGI, under the marketing efforts...
Category: Commentary
Element Beats Illumina to the $200 Genome
It has been a predictably pedestrian JP Morgan Healthcare Conference for the genomics market. Illumina, PacBio, and Ultima Genomics all made big announcements earlier this year. As such, JPM is more of a “status update” for them. The two non-stealth candidates for juicy updates are Singular Genomics and Element Biosciences. On Monday Singular came out...
2022 In Review
With the JP Morgan update season about to get in full swing, I thought it might be a good time to review the sequencing field and where we stand at the beginning of 2023. The big news was, of course, that after years of having a virtual monopoly, Illumina faces a bevy of new competitors....
The Long and the Short of it – PacBio’s ASHG Announcements
The sequencing market continued its “Big Announcement Season” at ASHG and this time it’s PacBio’s turn. Not to be outdone by Illumina’s NovaSeq X announcement, they introduced TWO major sequencing platforms - one for long reads and one for short reads. Long Reads Their new long read platform announcement came with a good level of...
Illumina’s 2022 Product Roadmap
The new sequencer we’ve been waiting for Chemistry X (er, XLEAP-SBS) is coming to the NovaSeq! 2.5 times more data (50B clusters, 2x150b reads)! Faster cycle times! Higher accuracy (I’ve seen both 2X and 3X). And a brand new running cost as low as $2/Gb. Yay! But it’s going to cost you $1.25M to get...
FTC Suing to Block Illumina’s Acquisition of GRAIL
Back when Illumina first announced they were going to acquire GRAIL, the general feeling in the M&A field was that this wouldn’t trigger any antitrust issues. I was asked if I could think of any difficulties. I didn’t claim back then that I was an antitrust expert (and still don’t), but I did wonder if...
Spatial Genomics Popularity Contest
After a number of good suggestions, my list of spatial genomics platforms has grown to 18 (with four in the necropolis, mostly due to 10X Genomics acquisitions). [Edit: the list has now grown to 21 platforms.] There were a number of additional spatial protein platform suggestions, but many of these “high multiplexing” systems topped...
GenapSys 2020 Review and 2021 Predictions
GenapSys is the last company on my list presenting at JPMorgan Health this year, so they’re next on the list for updates. The rest (Oxford Nanopore, BGI, Roche/Genia/Stratos, Omniome, etc) can wait a bit, but I clearly need a deadline to get any writing done! 2020 Prediction Here's what I said: “I predict that the...
PacBio 2020 Review and 2021 Predictions
2020 started pretty rough for PacBio with the Illumina acquisition being called off (albeit with a nice $98 cushion). Then the pandemic hit, forcing them to shut down for a while. Finally, mid-summer the CEO and CFO announced their retirements. My guess is they were all in on the merger and didn’t want to be...
Illumina 2020 Review and 2021 Predictions
I like to procrastinate to the very last second, so here’s the initial entry of a review of my 2020 predictions and what I see for 2021. I’ll start off with Illumina because they’ll be presenting today at JPMorgan Health. I'll try to get to the others as quickly as I can. As far as...