This post is about Seracare’s new direction for Precision Medicine (in particular Precision Oncology), and the launch of a new product the Seraseq Solid Tumor Mutation Mix-I (AF20). But I’ll start first with a story from my days at Illumina.
It was ten years ago this week that I last launched a product. It was the Illumina Infinium Human-1 Genotyping BeadChip, and it took months of hard work, many core-team meetings, plenty of long days and many hallway discussions about the finest details of the product. Long days and many meetings go together: how can you get the things you commit to in a meeting ever done if you go to many meetings?
And in case anyone is wondering, yes that is the job of a Product Manager – you get to work hard and work closely with a team from across different areas of the company (research, manufacturing, quality, support, and engineering) and you get to experience many ups-and-downs, and learn things about yourself and others through this experience that you carry with you. These may be hard days, but they are good ones.
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.
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 in how genetics and genomics is revolutionizing healthcare. The genetics revolution has been taking place for some time now – here’s a handy 
