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 is making a break from … Read more
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 Diego, let’s assess where we are.
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 Ion Torrent YouTube channel, and for those who have complained about the ‘lack of data from the Ion Proton’ there’s quite a lot of ground to cover, and there’s a fair amount of interesting items about the PGM too. The Ion World-specific list of videos are linked here on an Ion Torrent Community page for ease of reference.
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, and Craig Venter from Synthetic Genomics and the J. Craig Venter Institute all speaking.
After preparation of the library (and careful quantitation) and preparation of the amplified template comes the main event: the sequencing itself. While there are several methods available, the methods can be divided into three broad divisions.
The three divisions are (firstly) Pyrophosphate Release (named for the original patent by Mostafa Ronaghi and others in 1998 when he was a graduate student at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm); this is the method that uses individual nucleotide flow across all templates, and then detects the signal. (Pyrosequencing – now owned by QIAGEN – detects pyrophosphate, but is not a ‘next-generation’ sequencer as it is not massively parallel; however Roche / 454 FLX used essentially the same method.) Jonathan Rothberg, who parallelized the FLX pyrosequencing method at Curagen, simply changed the detection method with Ion Torrent.
In the roads I travel (and it is now over six years since I made that fateful move from being an ‘internal’ Product Manager to ‘customer-facing’ sales representative) the buying process is all about perceptions of the customer. Right or wrong, potential customers each receive the information from a local representative (from whichever vendor) and filter it through their own set of criteria. Opinions they read in their journals of choice, opinions from their valued collaborators and other friends in the research world, tidbits gathered from their post-docs, all form a perception in their mind about what a particular product’s value is to them.
“The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.” – William Gibson
This is a blog about next-generation sequencing and it’s intersection with marketing and business in general (primarily), which happens to be my particular area of professional expertise, having focused on next-generation sequencing since late 2006, when Illumina (my then-employer) acquired a startup called Solexa for $417M. I have had product development, product management, marketing (all in the San Diego area with Illumina) and key-account sales roles (in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US serving both the NIH and the entire SouthEast region with Illumina, RainDance Technologies and currently with Life Technologies). I am presently in a marketing role at Life Technologies Corporation (which used to be Applied Biosystems and Invitrogen Corporation), heavily involved with both the Ion Torrent PGM / Proton as well as the SOLiD / 5500 platforms. (More information about me can be found here; if you are interested in anything Ion Torrent and NGS market overall you’ve come to the right place.)