AGBT 2026 Preview

AGBT starts on Monday at the Signia by Hilton Bonnet Creek in Orlando on Monday, but the pre-conference flurry of announcements is already rolling out.  Here is a quick scan of what's already been telegraphed to be in store next week - and expect more announcements over the next few days.  I'm getting to Orlando on Friday - far before most people so perhaps I can actually focus on writing (though I also have a backlog of follow-ups from last week's SLAS lab automation conference).   I've supplied links for many of these items, though in some cases it isn't easy to find a single link to include

Instrument Companies

On the hardware side, on Thursday 2/19 Element Biosciences rolls out their first webinar presentation covering their new high throughput benchtop instrument christened VITARI, which is promised to deliver a human genome 30X dataset for $100.  (website for webinar)

Roche is promising the "dawn of Axelios" - which hopefully means we'll get some clarity on the pricing model for consumables.  It would also be stunning if there aren't any further increments in sequencing metrics, as these seem to improve every time Roche presents at a major meeting. (LinkedIn post)

Illumina doesn't seem to have any hardware updates, but seems to emphasize the 5-base methylation detection method appears to be getting a lot of attention - though I'm sure they won't be silent about Constellation, single cell, spatial, protein or any other part of the portfolio.  Many presentations will be available on the website for later viewing by attendees and distant fans alike (website)

PacBio will give updates on their evolved SPRQ-Hq, their version of Hi-C called CiFi for assembling genomes from small amounts of input material and PureTarget for capturing difficult regions of the genome. Also updates on reuse of SMRT cells.

Complete Genomics is unveiling an update to their top-of-line sequencer, now dubbed DNBSEQ-T7

Single Cell & Spatial Companies

10X Genomics is never silent, and of particular interest is any news on integrating the technology and products from the Scale Biosciences acquisition. 

Similarly, Parse Biosciences is now part of QIAGEN - has this changed anything?

Singular Genomics will officially release their G4X spatial instrument, promising 500-plex RNA and 18-plex protein plus the equivalent of H&E staining.  A 5 day workflow from FFPE block to data which can accommodate up to 128 samples and as much as 40 square centimeters of tissue.  Cost per sample promised to be "low hundreds".  Plus a large amount of validation data - 500 square centimeters of total tissue across 1700 FFPE samples for over 400M cells - atop 20,000 FFPE samples for over 400M cells run for collaborators. (LinkedIn post)

3D spatial company Stellaromics has a limited attendance event during some of the Bronze presentations. (LinkedIn post)

Vizgen is promising updates on their MERFISH 2.0 chemistry as well as their proteomics portfolio. (LinkedIn post)

Waters Biosciences - formerly BD Biosciences but some corporate rearranging completed early this month -  is having an 8am Tuesday session on the theme of "Benchmarking is Broken: Let's Fix It" - critically examining single cell and spatial benchmarks and how they do or don't serve the community.  Killer panel of spatial biology stars, featuring moderator Luciano Martelotto from Waters and panelists Ioannis Vlaches (Harvard Medical School), Jasmine Plummer (St. Jude's), Catherine Aquino (Functional Genomics Center Zurich) and Linda Orzolek (OMAPix). (LinkedIn post)

Bruker is promising a "next-generation leap in spatial proteomics" from their CellScape platform. (LinkedIn post)

Library & Sample Prep Companies

NEB is touting an enzymatic shearing kit optimized for long read sequencing, joining last year's introduction by seqWell of a transposase-based shearing approach. (LinkedIn post)

Watchmaker Genomics announced a license with CRISPR company Caribou Biosciences to use Cas9 technology for library normalization - and will also be covering sub-5hour total RNA libraries and tweaks to their DNA library prep technology to improve low frequency

Canal Biosciences is debuting as a Contributing Sponsor with a new library prep technology which doesn't alter or lose the ends of input fragments. (LinkedIn post)

EpiCypher is promising long read multiomics tools plus CUT&Tag for FFPE (LinkedIn post)

Danaher's IDT unit is offering updates on a number of library prep innovations (webpage)

Newcomer MicroPure Genomics will be running technology demonstrations of their flow-based high molecular weight DNA purification scheme. ( LinkedIn post )

Caveats

Of course, this is an incomplete list of all the sequencing technology space companies which will be presenting or present - not only have I just started going through poster abstracts (some of which seem to have partial reveals on some previously fully stealthed companies) but I've failed above to cover tech developer sponsors Codetta (Bronze), Revvity, Volta, Ellis Bio, MilliporeSigma, Twist, LatchBio, Cellanome.  Gives me something to atone for in future posts!

If you're going to be at the conference, I hope to chat with you - and my schedule hasn't quite reached total gridlock or desperate invasions on my start-of-the-morning routine.