GenomeQuest Industry

Illumina's HiSeq 2000 running at capacity can sequence two whole human genomes per week at 30x coverage - enough for a full-blown whole genome analysis. One instrument produces 104 human genomes per year. Beijing Genomics Institute alone has purchased 128 of these instruments. The Broad has 51. And based on Illumina's 2010 Q1 10-Q filing, they've ...

Good to see reasonably positive/researched/balanced reporting on genomics in a mainstream publication: http://www.economist.com/node/16349358?story_id=16349358.  I believe that the public getting educated/excited about genomics-driven personalized medicine will accelerate the genomics "arc to clinical" -- a good thing, I think, for the life science community and the public at large. Some excerpts: ... the science of biology is ...

Last week, GenomeQuest held our "The Next Generation of Sequence Analysis" seminar for Harvard-based Researchers.  It was sponsored by Bob Steen, manager of the Harvard Biopolymers Facility. According to Bob, it was the 2nd largest crowd ever for his seminars and the largest ever for a software topic -- an indicator that reseachers ...

The provocative title The Debt Crisis and the Human Genome belies Mike Mandels underlying message. I do worry that articles like this and the recent NY Times article A Decade Later, Human Genome Project Yields Few New Cures feed the cynics. Our society is so enamored with immediate gratification. Rome wasn't built in ...

This week, I attended the Consumer Genomics Show (more so a “clinical genomics" show). In a session on Next Generation Sequencing led by five industry experts, a recurring observation was that, on the one hand, steady investments in sequencing technology was indeed delivering breathtaking value and driving down sequencing costs – bravo indeed and ...

Lincoln Stein lays out "The case for cloud computing in genome informatics" pretty nicely. The article describes the inflection point of sequencing technology. That is from 1990 to 2004 'base-pair/$' doubled every 19 months versus a doubling every 5 months since 2004 to present. There is no end in sight. Moving data to the ...

Despite understandably varied opinions on the US federal government, I think that most of us can agree that U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH) has done remarkable things for the world and life sciences. They are the world driver and biggest supporter of genetic research, they largely funded the $3B Human Genome Project, and ...

Following an earlier post, the ruling by the federal judge 0n the BRCA patents held by Myriad has created a firestorm of controversy in the blogs and in the popular media. Check this out!: NPR: Gene Ruling Could Have Wide Implications 60 Minutes: Gene Patents The industry blog Genetic Future has sponsored an ...

The most thoughtful folks in the health care industry acknowledge that the future will be defined by molecular (aka personalized) medicine. Without being infinitely tedious, it will be a matter of measuring your body's instructions (DNA) and your present state (RNA/proteins) and prescribing a course of treatment with the most likely positive outcome and ...

Earlier I blogged on the distinctions between Infrastructure, Platform, and Software-as-a-Service offerings. The message was that "cloud" is an overloaded word and takes many forms and has different customer value propositions. A recent commentary in GenomeWeb "Considering a Cloud? Cost isn't everything..." citing the paper "The Real Cost of a CPU Hour" ...