Next Gen Sequencing

BGISEQ-500 Debuts at the International Congress of Genomics 10

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The International Congress of Genomics 10 is a conference held annually in Shenzhen, China where BGI is headquartered. Largely attended by life science researchers in China, the invited speakers will have a natural connection to the genetics and genomics community in China, in particular Huanming Yuan. And over the past seven or eight years BGI … Read more

New Cepheid GeneXpert Omni at #AACC2015

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With my recent transition to the clinical market segment with SeraCare, their major  conference for the year is the American Association for Clinical Chemistry. With some 20,000 attendees, and several hundred vendors filling the Atlanta Convention Center, there were a number of interesting real-time instruments shown. I’ll start with the most impressive and surprising of … Read more

SeraCare Precision Oncology

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Seracare precision medicine ngs control reference material seraseq mutation mix
The Seraseq Solid Tumor Mutation Mix-I (AF20), the first product from SeraCare’s Precision Medicine Group

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.

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Complete human diplotypes & Google X Life Sciences podcast

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Theral Timpson produces a weekly podcast at Mendelspod.com, and in his latest edition he interviews me about Google X Life Sciences (I wrote about them before here), long-read sequencing (in particular Pacific Biosciences) which then I’m able to discuss the value of complete human diploid sequencing, and my involvement with the Behind the Bench blog. … Read more

A few observations from Advances in Genome Biology and Technology

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In the closing session of the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting recently concluded in Marco Island, Florida, the main organizers Dr. Eric Green (National Human Genome Research Institute Director, Bethesda MD) and Dr. Elaine Mardis (Co-director with Rick Wilson of the Genome Institute of Washington University, St. Louis MO) asked an interesting question … Read more

Marketing Precision Medicine Pt2

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After writing up ‘Marketing Precision Medicine’ it turned out that I spent so much time in giving the background and context, that I only was able to mention briefly the marketing challenge that the Precision Medicine Initiative brings. So here is Part 2, getting deeper into the Marketing challenge of precision medicine – a concern … Read more

The Core Competency of Google is not Life Sciences

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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 ‘laboratory technician’), I met a … Read more

First Customer PhiX Data from the NextSeq 500

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Image courtesy of Wikipedia user Fdardel
Phi X 174 image courtesy of Wikipedia user Fdardel

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 by the end of the first quarter (March), but here we are in mid-June and the first data is only now being reported on the NextSeq 500 system.

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