complete genomics
dgmacarthur | August 16, 2010The long-awaited public stock offer from third-generation sequencing technology company Pacific Biosciences has finally arrived (here's the SEC filing, and coverage from Matthew Herper and GenomeWeb).
PacBio has already raised almost US$400 million in venture capital, and aims to increase this by up to US$200 million from its share offering. The sheer scale of these figures gives you a sense of just how much money is being thrown around in the race towards ever cheaper, faster and more accurate DNA sequencing machines. Of course, whether investors will decide to throw more money in PacBio's…
dgmacarthur | June 3, 2010Jay Flatley, CEO of sequencing giant Illumina, announced at the Consumer Genetics Conference today that the company had reduced the price of its retail whole-genome sequencing service. At $19,500 this still isn't in the realm of an impulse buy for most of us, but it's a long way down from the $48,000 that Illumina offered at the launch of its service, and more than an order of magnitude below the $350,000 price paid for the first ever retail genome.
Illumina's press release notes that bulk orders of 5 or more genomes drop the price to $14,500 per genome, and "[i]ndividuals with serious…
dgmacarthur | March 11, 2010
Zoe McDougall from Oxford Nanopore points me to a press release from Illumina announcing a new era of celebrity genomics:
Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) today announced that it has sequenced the DNA of American actress Glenn Close, the first publicly named female to have her DNA sequenced to full coverage. The service was completed in Illumina's CLIA certified and CAP accredited laboratory utilizing Illumina's Genome Analyzer technology and following the established process shown at http://www.everygenome.com/. Ms. Close's DNA was sequenced to an average depth greater than 30 fold, providing…
dgmacarthur | February 28, 2010The main theme of this year's Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting should come as no surprise to regular readers: sequencing. Generating as many bases of DNA sequence as quickly, cheaply and accurately as possible is the goal of the moment, and the number of companies jostling to achieve that goal is growing rapidly.
The meeting saw impressive performances from established players in the field, especially Illumina: their new HiSeq 2000 instrument seems to have dug in as the platform of choice for generating vast amounts of high-quality short-read data. Life Technologies seem to…
dgmacarthur | February 22, 2010I'll be at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting in Marco Island, Florida for the next week, soaking up sun and genomics, keeping my eye out for the anticipated major announcements from sequencing companies and researchers, and quietly panicking about my presentation on Thursday. You'll hear more about the meeting from me and the other bloggers there - Luke Jostins, David Dooling, Dan Koboldt and Anthony Fejes - over the next week.
It's amazing to think that it was at the same meeting in 2009 - just one year ago - that Complete Genomics emerged dramatically from stealth mode…
dgmacarthur | January 12, 2010The big news from the JP Morgan investment conference today is the announcement of a brand new shiny sequencing machine from Illumina, the HiSeq 2000. The new machine boasts an impressive set of statistics, and looks likely to gradually replace Illumina's GAIIx as the workhorse of most modern sequencing facilities.
So, how excited should we be?
Let's be clear about this up front: this new machine, while impressive, represents an incremental advance rather than a dramatic technological leap forward. This is still second-generation sequencing, generating relatively small snippets of DNA…
dgmacarthur | January 4, 2010
The Gene Sherpa predicts that Complete Genomics will win the Archon X Prize in Genomics in 2010. In the comments, Keith Robison is wisely skeptical. I agree with Keith - it's unlikely that the X Prize will be won this year, and if it is the winner is unlikely to be Complete Genomics.
For those who don't know the prize, here's the brief summary: the X Prize Foundation will give US$10 million to the first team to satisfy the following conditions:
sequence 100 human genomes within 10 days or less, with
an accuracy of no more than one error in every 100,000 bases sequenced [note that the…
dgmacarthur | November 3, 2009New-technology DNA sequencing provider Complete Genomics will provide near-complete genome sequences of 100 individuals to the Institute for Systems Biology, driving the first ever association study for a complex trait using whole-genome sequencing. Here's the press release, and GenomeWeb has some additional information.
This is pretty exciting stuff:
The Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) and Complete Genomics Inc. announced today that they are embarking on a large-scale human genome sequencing study of Huntington`s disease (HD). ISB has engaged Complete Genomics to sequence 100 genomes,…
dgmacarthur | August 26, 2009Complete Genomics is finally back on the road towards fulfilling its promises of $5000 human genome sequences, after delays in obtaining funding for a massive new facility pushed back its plans by six months. The $45 million in funding it announced this week will be sufficient to build the new Silicon Valley facility, which the company claims will have the capacity to sequence a staggering 10,000 genomes over the course of 2010.
Complete Genomics is an unusual creature in the second-generation sequencing menagerie: instead of aiming to generate revenue by selling machines to researchers and…
dgmacarthur | April 13, 2009This BBC video is worth checking out - it's a nice visual display of the processes used by genome sequencing provider Complete Genomics to smash apart and resequence a human genome.
I can't help but wonder if Complete built the blue-lit, monitor-lined hallway (screen shot below) purely for this video; it makes for great cinematics.
It must be personal genomics week here in the UK - the BBC also ran a generally favourable story on 23andMe a few days ago.
Subscribe to Genetic Future.
dgmacarthur | April 12, 2009GenomeWeb News reports that genome sequencing company Complete Genomics is cutting costs in the lead-up to the commercial launch of its whole-genome sequencing service in June:
In order to save its remaining cash, the company recently
implemented "a variety of cost-saving measures," including "some
reductions" in the salaries of its employees and a trimming of
"non-essential" costs, such as discretionary spending. "We just want to
be prudent about [spending] our cash," Reid said.
The company has not had any layoffs, he added, and is "still running at full capacity."
At this time, he said,…
dgmacarthur | March 3, 2009I discussed the second-generation sequencing company Complete Genomics a couple of weeks ago (see here and here). These guys are unique in that they offer their technology only as a service, rather than the usual business model of selling platforms to genomics facilities, and a highly restricted service at that: Complete has stated fairly categorically that it will only be sequencing human genomes (no plants, algae, or even chimpanzees!).
Whether this business model will prove a commercial success remains to be seen, but the company seems to have impressed the genomics community with its…
dgmacarthur | February 9, 2009I wrote last week about the dramatic presentation here at AGBT by Clifford Reid, CEO of new DNA sequencing company Complete Genomics. Reid made grand promises - entire human genome sequencing for $5000 available this year, and the sequencing of a million complete human genomes within the next five years - and presented some impressive data on the sequencing of their first human genome, from an anonymous American male.
Reid's promises and data certainly caught the attention of the genomics community, and received decent media interest - the story was covered by New Scientist, Bio-IT World,…
dgmacarthur | February 5, 2009Regular readers will know that I'm at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) meeting this week, one of the most highly-awaited meetings on the genomics calendar.
There's a huge amount of fascinating data being presented (anyone interested in a blow-by-blow account should follow Anthony Fejes' live-blogging), but there's definitely an overarching theme: the evolving battle between the new-technology sequencing companies. This is a competition that most researchers in genomics are watching with great interest, because it promises to bring about very rapid advances in the speed,…
dgmacarthur | February 1, 2009Complete Genomics is a DNA sequencing company that launched back in October, and has been creating a buzz in the genomics community ever since.
The company's business model is based around a novel technology for rapidly generating DNA sequence data; but rather than make its money by selling its platform to genomics facilities and biotech companies (as do its competitors, such as Illumina and ABI), Complete will be offering its technology only through its own purpose-built service facilities.
The buzz has focused on whether Complete's technology will be accurate and powerful enough to meet…