Invivoscribe PrepQuant: Streamlining Clinical DNA Extraction

The liquid biopsy space continues to grow and heat up - just this week Roche's Foundation Medicine unit announced the acquisition of Minimal Residual Disease (MRD) test developer Saga Diagnostics for just over a half billion dollars.  Numerous MRD and Multi-Cancer Early Detection (MCED) companies continue to spring up, with even more analyte types - first it was cell-free DNA, but now cell-free RNA and exosomes have entered the picture and probably a bunch more.  Extracting DNA from biofluids - mostly plasma, but sometimes urine or something else - is a critical step with many available methods - and many of those are labor intensive or incompletely automated.  As testing volumes scale, there will be a need to reduce the hands-on effort both to keep costs down and consistency up.  Just before AACR, Invivoscribe unveiled a new instrument for cell-free DNA purification and quantification which intends to reduce hands on time significantly over existing methods.

AGBT Agriculture 2026: A Few Paragraphs on Graphs

AGBT Agriculture was a really nice meeting - lovely venue in the Arizona desert, a meeting size that you felt you could (but weren't compelled to) introduce yourself to everyone, good food, great scientific content, and everyone super-friendly.  I came for the workshops on Sunday, and there were two on graph genomes / pangenomes.  Which was a theme throughout the meeting - not every talk or paper mentioned these topics, but a huge fraction did.  The agriculture world - both plant and animal (hmmm, no mushroom talks that I can recall) - is completely sold on the utility of graph genomes.  Ideally really large ones not only capturing the complete genomic diversity of a species, but also layering in information from related species so that the graph can service questions of when particular genomic features arose in evolution.

Flowers: A Matter of Timing

I'm headed over to AGBT Agriculture tomorrow, after getting to Phoenix ahead of time to check out some sights.  The Desert Botanical Garden is amazing, particularly since it stays open until 10pm and so you can watch the lighting change as the sun sets and then enjoy some artistic artificial lighting on some of the trails.  Before I left, a few daffodils were in bloom back at my home.  So while I have plants on the mind, I'll unleash another plant engineering fantasy but this time with a dose of contemplation whether it would really be a good idea.  What if we could engineer flowers to show up at any time we wanted?

A Wish For Snail-Inspired Tulips

About a year ago we took a family vacation to the Netherlands with a prime goal to see tulips - and tulips we did see!  Even a rainy day (what are the odds of that in Holland?) couldn't steal the magic from the famed Keukenhof Gardens, and outside the renowned Rijksmuseum was a spectacular tulip bed.  I'm now dealing with one side effect of that trip - I went a bit overboard ordering bulbs on our return and because our garage is a bit warmer than outside I now have many pots of bulbs which are far ahead of the schedule set by those in the new garden beds I was ordering for.  Nice problem to have.  But as much as I can go crazy with existing varieties of tulips, I'd love to see even more varieties.  Indeed, I have some very specific ideas for engineering tulips that I would find irresistible.

One of several hundred shots I have of bulb beds at Keukenhof

Keukenhof ornamental windmill with a field of tulips in foreground, seen from the electric "whisper boat"

One of dozens of shots I have of the beds by the Rijksmuseum

icon16: Precise Amplification for All!

I've loved the n6tec icon96 instrument since they first tipped me about it several years back.  The idea of running 96 independent PCRs in parallel was just too attractive; the instrument I'd always dreamed of. I never take payments from companies I write about, but probably could make a reasonable claim on commissions for a few icon96 units - I have a hard time not going into total fanboy mode.  But not everybody works in batches that are multiples of 96 - and now at ABRF n6 has launched an affordable option, the $29.5K icon16, to enable nearly any lab to access this technology.

Who's Going to Buy Roche Axelios?

After Roche's AGBT presentation, a key question for many is "who is going to buy an Axelios?".  Below are some thoughts on the topic, based around general classes of sequencing labs that exist in the world.

LinkedIn Laments 1 of N: Where's the API?

In my current role I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. A core task is to identify possible customers, and LinkedIn is rich hunting ground. I'm still sending each reach-out message individually (though admittedly often by pasting a message copied from a growing bank of crafted pitches), so even if I wasn't morally opposed to broad spamming I don't have the bandwidth for it. LinkedIn offers many ways for possible customers to reveal their interests - there's one's profile, any posts you make, comments on other posts, and what you hit like on.  Indeed, those last two can be particularly valuable as LinkedIn has some constraints on search results based on my localization within the broad LinkedIn connection graph, comments plus likes are categories which can leap me away from my parochial bounds.  Because I use LinkedIn so much, I of course have opinions about what I perceive as shortcomings, which I will periodically impose on the readers of this space. And today's is my frustration and degree of bewilderment that LinkedIn lacks an API.