CariGenetics: Breakthrough Breast Cancer Genetics in the Caribbean - but Also a Template for ONT Clinical Push?

London Calling isn't nearly as exhausting as AGBT, but the first day of talks is packed and then follows with the social event that goes late - this year with CEO Gordon Sanghera living out his dream of being the frontman for a band.  Then if you'd like you can follow the crowd to a pub to drink on ONT's tab (that and crashing the ONT wrap-up dinner is the extent of my drawing personal benefit from ONT, contrary to a commenter on the prior piece who wrongfully believes they fund my LC expenses), and when that pub closes to another one (I peeled off after the first pub).  So one can be a bit draggy heading into the second morning, but that was solved quickly by CariGenetics CEO Dr. Carika Weldon, who wowed with an exuberant strut down the central runway to a lively calypso beat - and then wowed everyone further with a stellar presentation.  She also gave the lunchtime Product Demo talk (alas, I can't find that talk either on YouTube or in Nanopore Community) in the central product area, filling in some colorful details on her young company's early travails - all resolutely conquered.

ElysION vs. TraxION: Divergent Shots at Applied Market End-To-End Automation

London Calling was a particularly good opportunity to take stock of Oxford Nanopore's progress to a "fire-and-forget" sample-to-answer solution for "applied markets" such as food safety, public health and biotherapeutics quality control.   ElysION (formerly Project TurBOT) and TraxION represent very different approaches targeting different subsets of this broad market opportunity - and I heard from some interested parties that neither is quite what they want.  That doesn't mean they aren't right, but it does mean ONT may need to think of more approaches.

The broad concept is to have a a device that takes some sort of biological input, with minimal to no upstream processing, and performs all necessary steps so that nanopore sequencing data emerges from the instrument, with no human intervention after the run is set up.  ONT is envisioning these being placed in clinical labs, public health labs, biotherapeutic quality control labs, etc.