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Thursday, February 5, 2009

Complete Genomics

[Missed start of talk]

Inexpensive. Non-sequential bases? No ligase required.

Long Fragment Reads. Start with high mol wt dna – 70-100k bases, sample prep that barcodes them, sequence it, and then informatically map it back to the fragment. Assembly then gives you 100kb base length. Chromosome phasing begins to become possible. [spiffy!]

Thus, you can do this over a genome, as well, it allows the maternal and paternal dna to be worked out.

Not planning to sell instruments: only going to be a sequence centre doing it as a service. 20,000 genomes by end of 2010. Big challenge is actually assembly. 60K cores in cluster, 30Pb diskspace.

Will partner with Genome centres. Yesterday signed an agreement to try a pilot with Broad. Will build genome centres around the world.

Trying to make sequencing ubiquitous. Send them sample, then click on link to get your sample.

Saves you capital on sequencing and then on compute infrastructure.

Will only do Humans! [I cracked up at this point.]

My comments: Ok, I missed the beginning, but the end was intersting. I totally don't understand the business model. By doing only human, they'll only find hospital customers.. which hospital will pay for them to build a data centre. I'll elaborate more on that in another post.

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2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Three things:
1] They do need a ligase. in fact it is critical.
2] Hospitals do not need to build a datacenter- they just get results. Imagine a glorified .asn1 file or somesuch being delivered for each sample. Complete needs a datacenter for each genome center.
3] Human is the biggest market- this is a company, not a research institute (though i'd imagine their process would work on any genome with a reference)

February 5, 2009 8:52:00 PM PST  
Blogger Anthony said...

On the first point, that was the first thing I heard when I walked in - I missed the majority of how their technology worked, so I'll be checking up on that tomorrow.

On the second point, no, hospitals don't need to build a datacentre, but why would they allow themselves to become completely dependent on this particular company who will be supported only by hospitals? Thus, if the company is successful at building local sequencing/data centres for each hospital, in essence, the hospital will be the one paying to build the centre - just amortizing over a longer period in terms of payments.

And 3... yes, it's the biggest market, but that doesn't mean the business model is a good one. I can see many MANY reasons why this isn't the best way to go about doing it. (I also see several ways to make it better - but the way it stands now, I don't believe it's going to fly.)

At any rate, I said I'd save the long version for another day, so I'll write that up later. (=

Thanks for the comment!

February 5, 2009 9:16:00 PM PST  

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