Congratulations are in order to the US Food and Drug Administration for approving the Illumina MiSeqDx™ system, including two Cystic Fibrosis assays, and two additional approvals for the platform (the instrument and the reagents). This is the first next-generation sequencer approved by the FDA, an important milestone reflecting a sea-change […]
“The future is already here – it is just not very evenly distributed.” William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and the person who coined the term ‘cyberspace’. Way back in 2006 or so when I was working for Illumina, the personal genetics firm 23andMe launched their whole-genome genotyping service (called ‘Genetic Testing […]
At a recent Ion World event right before this year’s ASHG meeting in Boston, Dr. Eric Topol gave a keynote talk entitled “Breakthroughs in Sequencing and the Future of Health Care”. He began his talk by asking for a show of hands in the audience present (over 300), “How many […]
Almost a year ago I wrote up this post about a startup called BioNano Genomics, which was hard at work launching a nanofluidic device and scanner called the Irys™. At February’s AGBT meeting in Marco Island (FL), they presented a scientific poster about the spider mite genome. Tetranychus urticae has […]
There are two next-generation sequencing ‘platforms’ (i.e. systems) that are being prepared for commercial launch; one from QIAGEN (that I wrote about here and I was told at ASHG that they working hard to launch it in 2014), and another from GnuBIO. This technology came out of the same laboratory […]
The American Society for Human Genetics 2013 Annual Meeting was held this week in Boston. Starting from Tuesday and going through Saturday, there are ancillary meetings both before and after (and Life Technologies had an Ion World event the two days prior). As one of the two ‘main event’ trade-show […]
Over the two days right before the annual ASHG (American Society of Human Genetics) meeting in Boston, Life Technologies held a two-day event where several hundred Ion Torrent customers and other interested parties attended. Updates for three upcoming products (the Ion Chef automated template prep, the PII chip, and a […]
You may (or may not) have heard about digital PCR, which is set to be the next application set to explode in the gene expression market. But Life Technologies has a continuing investment in genetic analysis, and this new instrument, the QuantStudio 3D, demonstrates it.
Every human being came from a single cell. While that fact may not be so obvious in our day-to-day routine, the power of a single cell is observed with the burst of research activity in stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells (and also see the Nobel Prize winner for […]
Today Ion Torrent launches a neat product based upon a highly multiplexed technology called AmpliSeq, called the Ion AmpliSeq Exome, covering >97% of the CCDS regions. But before getting into the details, a little context is in order.
It was something of a surprise to see Sony exhibit at the AACR meeting, and a bit more of a surprise to see that they have been successful in their quest to diversify out of the CD, DVD and BluRay manufacturing business. iCyt is a company founded in Champaign Illinois, […]
Earlier this year at the February AGBT Conference, a person from QIAGEN came over to the Ion Torrent suite and asked me a few questions about the Ion Proton and in particular the upcoming Ion Chef unit. (The Ion Chef for those not familiar with it can replace the OneTouch […]
