Nextgen sequencing adds another player

February 10, 2008

Pacific Biosciences joins the nextgen sequencing club, which is growing faster than I ever imagined and in a year or two is likely to go through another round of consolidation (following last years acquisitions of nextgen companies by some of the big boys).

I won’t comment too much about the viability of PacBio. It seems they are targeting the next generation of nextgen with a targeted release date of 2010. Will that be too late as George Church seems to think? The company has the money, with Kleiner Perkins being one of the investors. The differentiator seems to be the long read size. Can the company make the cost competitive? The speed? As nextgen moves to the mainstream, those are the questions that the company will need to address. As with any market, once price wars start companies need to differentiate themselves and try and lower cost. This is not the biggest market in the world so there is bound to be some stabilization (there are already way too many consumer genomics companies).

For more on Pacific Biosciences, read David Hamilton’s excellent analysis

The nextgen sequencing wars are just starting, both technologically and to find out who remains standing. Will be very interesting to return in five years time and see where we end up.

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