Chatting Apton Acquisition with PacBio CEO Christian Henry

PacBio CEO Christian Henry chatted with me recently by teleconference on a variety of topics, but the focus was the recent PacBio acquisition of Apton Biosystems for $85M in equity.   As a regular reminder, my employer’s CEO reports in a sense to Henry, as he’s on the Board of Directors.  A particularly interesting revelation by Henry is that PacBio had its eye on Apton in late 2021, essentially as soon as they completed theOmniome acquisition announced in July 2021 that formed the foundation for their now-released Onso short read instrument.     PacBio believed then that the desktop instrument design from Omniome wouldn’t be sufficient; PacBio felt compelled to have a path to a high-throughput instrument.  While they felt an internal effort was possible, an acquisition might shave many years off the timeline.  And PacBio liked Apt on’s concepts and launched into discussions and even made an acquisition offer to Apton’s management, but no deal was reached – but nor were any bridges burned.About a year later, PacBio was at ASHG unveiling the Revio long read instrument and sent new feelers to Apton – let’s explore a collaboration marrying our chemistry to your instrument.  Before long, just such a proof-of-concept instrument was underway, and in under two weeks positive results were in hand.  Results weren’t as good as with the well-tuned Onso prototype, but nor were they discouraging – perhaps with tuning the gap could be closed.  The proof-of-con...
Source: Omics! Omics! - Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Source Type: blogs