J.P. Morgan: PacBio

PacBio CEO Christian Henry ’s presentation at J.P. Morgan wasn't rich in technical specifics. But he gave a very bullish portrait of a company aiming for the stars.   A conflict reminder: he’s a member of the Board of the Strain Factory that employs me, though I haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting him.The biggest news is a broad partnership with Invitae four clinical human genome sequencing. The only specific here is that this is not the whole enchilada; platform development will take place both within the Invitae collaboration and outside it. What might that development be?Between Henry ’s comments in the Q&A and a few info crumbs on slides there will be pushed to further tune all the canister. Her mentioned efforts on dyes and further improving SMRTcell loading efficiency. There was chatter on Twitter about an overdue update to improve HiFi yields.Henry talked of the importance of increasing ZMW packing, but gave no specifics other than to suggest this is more"development" than"innovation" -- this was in response to a question asking if technical breakthroughs are required.    But we are left wondering on a timetable as well as what the next density might be; four-fold to 32M  wouldn’t be surprising on naïve geometry grounds. I suspect a huge area of joint effort with Invitae will be to automate HiFi library production. The current protocol is long, manual and labor intensive - not at all appealing for lease scale clinical use...
Source: Omics! Omics! - Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Source Type: blogs