Notes from a Conversation with PacBio's Christian Henry

PacBio CEO Christian Henry was kind enough to chat with me by videoconference just after JP Morgan.  To get the the obvious issue out of the way, let me say that while it is common to agree to meet with interview subjects at some future date when they are in Boston, he is the first one to suggest he would just stop by my desk and we'd head to a break room.  Henry sits on my employer's board, so if you think that shades my opinions you are forewarned.

Could Hercule Poirot Crack The Case of Genapsys' Business Strategy?

If you love a good mystery, let me try to draw you in to the enigma of Genapsys' business strategy.  Genapsys presented last week at J.P. Morgan, but nobody who wasn't there knows what they said or presented.  Keeping their future plans hush-hush is a strange course for a company that hasn't caught fire and is about to face multiple well-funded new competition.

Illumina Teases Two Glittering Enigmas

Illumina's J.P. Morgan presentation was largely focused on various applications of their platform.  But on the further platform development side, they did throw out two new products as very, very limited descriptions: Chemistry X as the future of sequencing-by-synthesis and Infinity for 10 kilobase synthetic reads.  Both have triggered a lot of speculation and indeed some very clever sleuthing, since neither really had anything but the faintest of details provided

Apologies & A Vow To Do Better

To my readers: I am quite embarrassed by the multiple errors which were present in the first two postings of the year, which include incomplete sentences in jumbled paragraphs, small but key errors of fact and writing "short read" in a key place where I meant "long read'. They are the sort of errors I can be quite harsh on others making.  I put too much emphasis on pushing these out and far, far too little on proofreading and reviewing them.  You deserve better.

Three Reactions from December's PacBio+Invitae Mendelspod

Theral Timpson hosted PacBio CEO Christian Henry and Invitae CEO Sean George for a Mendelspod podcast  back on Pearl Harbor day last month.  It's a fun, chatty interview with the two which illustrated why these two companies have an excellent strategic fit.  I won't summarize all of it, but I did have strong reactions to three points

2022: A Wild Year for Short Reads?

It looks like 2022 might be an exciting year for the short read genomics market, with new players taking on Illumina.  J.P. Morgan will be virtual next week, so perhaps some of the players will make some announcements.  Here's some thoughts on the situation as it stands now in a space where many of failed before -- QIAGEN, ThermoFisher (SOLiD) and Roche(454) -- as well as some have bailed out before even entering -- Agilent.