Element Previews High-Throughput VITARI

On the Thursday before AGBT, Element Biosciences unveiled their VITARI high throughput sequencer, expected to ship in the second half of this year.  VITARI surprised much of the sequencing community, including this pundit, as it seemed as though Element was devoting their development efforts to their AVITI24 multi-omic spatial system - which they continue to evolve.

VITARI offers two independent flowcells, each capable of generating 5 billion reads and 1.5 terabases of data at a price of $1 per gigabase.  The 36 hour runtime for 2x150 has garnered some criticism on social media as too long.  Priced at $689K, it joins a host of instruments around that price point.  Data quality is promised to be the same as Element's AVITI and AVITI24: 90% of bases Q30 or better and a substantial fraction of those Q40 or better.  VITARI has the same benchtop footprint as AVITI24.  All of Element's sequencing chemistries are supported, including the Freestyle on-instrument conversion of linear Illumina-formatted libraries to the circular format required by Element's instruments as well as Trinity on flowcell hybrid capture for exomes and other targeted sequencing applications.  The flowcell sports 6 lanes which have independent fluidics.

(image borrowed from Element website)

Element touts that not only will this deliver $100 30X human genomes, but whole exome sequencing in the $10 per sample range and bulk RNA for $15 per sample.  The sample loading plates are Society for Biomolecular Screening (SBS, but not their rival's SBS!)  format, enabling easier integration with laboratory automation (yea!). Element is also exploring being able to support Trinity and non-Trinity libraries on the same run to support blended approaches that combine Trinity whole exome with low pass whole genome.

How did Element accomplish this?  VITARI features improved optics with both higher resolution and larger field of view.  This in turn enables a slightly larger flowcell area and much smaller clusters at a higher cluster density.  

VITARI is also designed with sustainability and lab operations benefits.  Shipping volume has been reduced 63%, with a 74% reduction in frozen volume - the sequencing reagents themselves are shipped ambient but then stored in a freezer at the customer size.  Cartridges are designed to reduce their freezer footprint by 42% - a significant advantage since lab freezer space seems to always be at an extreme premium.  Element is exploring porting these improvements to AVITI, but has not committed to doing this.  

Element believes that VITARI fills an important niche in that many labs find the 25B flowcell on NovaSeq X - which many labs find yield 30-35 billion bases - too large and expensive and therefore requiring large, infrequent batches.  By this logic, the 5 billion basepair size is a better fit for academic cores and small biotechs, enabling economical yet frequent operation of the sequencer.  

AGBT this year featured a flurry of announcements which affect the short read sequencing landscape which I will cover soon  - VITARI, the sale of Complete Genomics to Swiss Rockets, Illumina announcing further uprated flowcells for NovaSeq X as well as TruPath Genome (ex-Constellation), Ultima announcing the UG200 and Solaris 2.0 chemistry, and Roche Axelios nearing launch.  Perhaps after I churn through all that I'll hazard to stick my neck out on what this new landscape means.