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 UK’s Industrial Strategy program just announced a £250 million program for early detection of disease. A public:private partnership with £79 million for the UK Govt plus £160 million from businesses and charities will be used to fund the Accelerating Detection of Disease programme. This […]
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 […]
The FBI just approved the Verogen NGS-based SNP identification system to create DNA profiles for inclusion in the USA national database. This follows on from many years of STR fingerprinting (developed in 1985 by Alec Jeffreys in the UK). The same technology can be used […]
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 […]
Everyone who has read this blog more than once has seen the Moore’s Law slide below (at a meeting, online, in a book, in a TED talk…). Many times this has come from the NHGRI who have tracked sequencing costs for yonks. Their costs presented […]
Updates in […] following some feedback and comments! MGI and Illumina are going head-to-head in a patent battle over the chemistry used to sequence genomes. The battle for sequencing supremacy was won many years ago by Illumina (although @nanopore,@MGI_BGI and a few others still in stealth […]
#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 […]
Cancer is a disease driven by mutation and copy-number aberration (CNA) yet most of the data generated to date has focused on SNV and InDel calling – the easy part of DNA analysis, particularly in ctDNA. This means that not enough focus has been put […]
A case report in the New England Journal of Medicine describes a pair of sesquizygotic twins, they share an identical maternal allele, but are chimeric (to different degrees) for two separately identical paternal alleles. The initial ultrasound at 6-weeks showed monozygotic twins, but at 14 weeks it was […]
