After 10+ years of mostly silence, Roche is finally starting to lift the curtain on their nanopore sequencer. It’s based on a combination of Genia’s nanopore platform (acquired in 2014) and Stratos Genomics’ Xpandomer chemistry (acquired in 2020). (See my previous post for some more background.) While Roche didn’t reveal all of the details at...
PacBio has announced their anticipated desktop HiFi sequencer, the Vega sequencing platform, something they’ve been talking about since early 2023. The platform, which is slated to ship in Q1 2025, is part of their strategy to broaden their sequencing portfolio (with a high throughput HiFi sequencer and high throughput “Onso-type” short read sequencer also in...
PacBio announced their new SPRQ long read sequencing chemistry ahead of ASHG. While it improves a couple of things, the headline is that it brings down the cost of a long read HiFi human genome to $500 (20X coverage). It manages this by squeezing out more output from each SMRT cell. That, plus some improved...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
San Diego startups had a good quarter raising money, pulling in a near record amount of $1.26B (as reported in the San Diego Union Tribune). San Diego County startups pulled in $1.26 billion in the second quarter, the region’s largest single quarter of venture funding since at least 2014, according to the National Venture...
The Launch Factory announced their first startup venture. Unlike a typical accelerator, the Launch Factory is sort of a “reverse” accelerator in that they come up with the startup idea and then search for entrepreneurs to execute the vision. It’s not a great model for most entrepreneurs, but it could be attractive for some. I...