What does Google X have to offer in life science diagnostic development? I’ve picked up a phrase, ‘it’s a narrow world’, from somewhere in my travels. Way back in my laboratory manager days in Santa Monica California at the John Wayne Cancer Institute (‘laboratory manager’ sounds so much better than […]
Illumina announced in January at the JP Morgan Healthcare conference the NextSeq 500, which was trumpeted (at least at the level of press releases and public relations) of being available immediately. Knowing first-hand how difficult it is to launch a new system, I had expected the first systems to ship […]
During AACR a number of great sessions were presented at ‘meet the expert’ sessions at 7am in the morning. One benefit of coming out West from the East Coast is not being able to stay up past 10:30pm or so local time, and waking up on my own at 4:30am […]
As a person who worked at a melanoma research institute once upon a time (the John Wayne Cancer Institute in Santa Monica California, by the way), it was a pleasure to hear Steven Rosenberg’s plenary talk at the AACR meeting in San Diego. A lot has happened since 1997. It […]
The reason I enjoy coming to large meetings like the American Association for Cancer Research (April 5-9 in San Diego) is the surprising things I learn. And the story of Elana Simon is one of them. She did not appear on the program, but a new award was initiated this […]
Living in the Washington DC area is a privilege. As a native Californian who has been on the East Coast for about 7 years now, living in the Mid-Atlantic has been so enjoyable for many professional and personal reasons. A case in point is proximity to the National Institutes of […]
WaferGen is a California Bay-Area company that originally developed an idea similar to BioTrove, which was to create a solid substrate with nanoliter-sized wells for high throughput real-time PCR. WaferGen’s SmartChip™ has 5,184 wells (that’s a 54 multiple of 96), while BioTrove’s OpenArray™ has 3,072 (that’s a 32 multiple of […]
Way back when I was pouring 35S-labeled dNTP Sanger sequencing polyacrylamide gels (and fond memories of using reagents like degassed acrylamide, TEMED and Silane), robotic automation was at that time only in an industrial or manufacturing context. Now there are many automated liquid handling companies (for example Beckman is a […]
Yesterday’s Ion Torrent Proton PII™ and Illumina NextSeq 500™ post certainly got a reaction from several quarters, including detailed pricing information about the 1x75bp format for the high-throughput configuration on the consumables. Instead of making edits to the original here are some clarifying points, as it is clear that Illumina […]
There has been a lot of publicity around the NextSeq 500 from Illumina, and it appears to have been designed to compete directly against Ion Torrent’s upcoming PII chip. Thanks to a visit to upstate New York last week, I met Dr. Sridar Chittur who told me how important it […]
Another interesting single-molecule technology is a company out of Providence (RI) called Nabsys. For several years I had heard the name involved in developing single-molecule sequencing technology, and this technology will start its initial product around genomic mapping, rather than sequencing. For background on genomic mapping and CNV analysis along […]
There are several commercial methods for looking at 10’s or 100’s of gene expression levels via a high throughput TaqMan™ assay from Life Technologies / Thermo Fisher Scientific, a competitive offering from Roche, Douglas Scientific, or also Fluidigm. The limitation of these technologies however is the amount of multiplexing a […]
