Recently I was asked about how important readlengths are, in the context of where MiSeq and Ion Torrent PGM currently stand in the marketplace. As the 454 advertisement used to say until recently, ‘Length Matters’. Given a number of recent announcements from Ion Torrent and the other folks in San […]
Product launches are exciting things, and the Ion Torrent Proton has officially launched (as of the recent Ion World conference September 13-14, 2012). For those who were not able to make it to San Francisco for that two-day event, we now have the videos of four presentations up on the […]
Attending any conference as a vendor is a busy time. Anyone who works in the life sciences vendor segment in commercial (i.e. customer-facing) marketing will understand that traveling to a few tradeshows in a year is a part of the job, and often an enjoyable part of the job at […]
“Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend”, Mao once said during the Revolutionary Days of 1957. Now in the middle of a genomics revolution, it feels that way in the market for genomics software to analyze next-generation sequencing data. New companies are being formed, large […]
Complete Genomics was started in 2005 with the promise of setting up a whole-genome sequencing service for millions of human genomes at a very low cost. Launching a service in 2009 at $5,000 per individual sample, Complete Genomics went public under the symbol GNOM in November of 2010 at $7.69/share, […]
A Life Technologies-sponsored 2-day conference called Ion World 2012 kicked off yesterday afternoon, with Jonathan Rothberg founder of Ion Torrent, Tim Triche of the Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles, Joe Boland of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Cancer Institute, Shawn Levy of Hudson-Alpha Biotechnology Institute, […]
Once upon a time, when I was working for one of my prior employers (you can guess which one it was as the company name started with an ‘I’), the offer was made to have 23andMe to do whole-genome genotyping of myself and my immediate family. It being 2007 or […]
This past week I attended the Cambridge Healthtech Institute’s “Applying Next Generation Sequencing” meeting in Providence R.I. Attendance was down which is an indicator of the maturity of NGS technology, constrained travel budgets, or an oversupply of NGS conferences, and probably a combination of all three.
Way back in 1997 a company launched one of the first commercial expression microarrays. The company was Affymetrix, the technology was micro-lithography, and the excitement around this new technology was palpable in the days before even the Human Genome Project had been completed.
Every mother-to-be who has what is considered an ‘at-risk’ pregnancy is informed of the risks to the fetus of a genetic abnormality. ‘At-risk’ can involve a long list of medical conditions (diabetes or cancer for example) or poor health choices (illegal drug use or smoking). Yet a common cause of […]
Immunology is a fascinating subject. Immense in its complexity, debilitating when the immune system malfunctions, our ability to fend off bacterial and viral infection, cancers of different types, and other foreign invaders is a remarkable biological capability. The NIH estimates 24M Americans are affected with an autoimmune disorder, but that […]
A few weeks ago this paper appeared in Nature Biotechnology, “Genome mapping on nanochannel arrays for structural variation analysis and sequence assembly”. It was the first publication of a startup company in San Diego called BioNano Genomics.
