Yesterday Illumina and Qiagen announced a 15 year deal to partner on development of NGS in vitro diagnostic kits to run on Illumina sequencers. And Qiagen, more quietly, announced that development of the GeneReader platform will cease. The second piece of news is unsurprising; I’d written about Qiagens […]
The current CMA report “Anticipated acquisition by Illumina, Inc. of Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc. Decision on relevant merger situation and substantial lessening of competition” makes for some interesting, if frustrating, reading. Interesting because of what the report says but frustrating because of the redaction […]
OK so Illumina is not (to my knowledge) planing on sponsoring the San Diego Padres. The title of this post was inspired by a wonderful bit of mistaken transcription of the recent Goldman Sachs Healthcare conference presentation by Francis deSouza “sequencers today generate baseball”…I think […]
#CRISPR diagnostics got even more exciting with two big announcements last month. Firstly, Sherlock Biosciences, has spun out from The Broad Institute and Wyss Institute commercialising the SHERLOCK and INSPECTR technologies (I’ll be covering the battle for CRISPR Dx dominance in this post). Secondly, researchers at […]
Last month Nature published a paper that revealed what many scientists knew or suspected. Cancer cell lines evolve very quickly due to positive clonal selection driven by cell culture conditions. And that this is likely the reason why the same cell line used in different labs […]
An interesting round up of the Top 10 Sequencing Companies from Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News highlights the dominance of Illumina on the life-sciences (genomics) industry. Illumina’s $2.752 billion in 2017 is almost double the combined revenue of the other 9 companies ($1.445 billion). With giants […]
Last night I watched in amazement as a beating heart was brought into the UK for transplant surgery – the heart was kept alive in the OCS HEART system. The BBC program Heart Transplant: A Chance to Live is outstanding TV and if you can […]
There’s a great paper from Pete Skene, postdoc 2011-2017 in the Henikoff lab, on eLife: An efficient targeted nuclease strategy for high-resolution mapping of DNA binding sites. The paper describes a novel method that performs as well as ChIP-Seq, but with lower background and false-positives. ChIP-seq is […]
I wanted to let you readers of my blog that a huge change is coming for me. At the end of February 2018 I’ll be leaving my job here at CRUK and am joining Astra Zeneca as the Director of a new R&D group. My time at CRUK […]
Because HPV has such a small and relatively simple genome (8,000 bp encoding 8 genes) it is possible to screen for genetic variation that may underly carcinogenesis. A team from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has just published the sequencing of over 5,570 human cell and tissue samples – […]
