ElysION Fields

Even before new CEO Francis Van Parys took the reins at Oxford Nanopore with the start of the month, the company had made yet another priming to the instrument lineup. The sample-to-answer ElysION has been sent to its eternal rest, presumably in the nicer part of Hades

Image courtesy of Rasmus Kirkegaard

Roche Axelios1 Run Pricing: Not A Knockout - Yet?

By far the most awaited news at AGBT was Roche's reveal of the pricing scheme for Axelios 1 consumables: what would be the structure and how much would different runs cost?  Indeed, Roche sequencing systems chief Mitu Chaudhary walked on to "The Final Countdown".  Roche did show its hand here, but stayed coy on the launch schedule beyond "Summer 2026".  Roche's pricing scheme clarified many questions, but also raised new ones.

Complete Genomics Sale: Gruyère or Emmental?

A bit of interesting news during AGBT was the announcement of the sale of Complete Genomics to Swiss Rockets, a Basel-based company which had last October licensed rights to Complete Genomic's CoolMPS technology for markets except Asia-Pacific.   This move is clearly designed to try to extract Complete Genomics from being banned in the future in US markets due to its perceived ties, in the minds of US lawmakers and politicians, to the government of China.  Swiss Rockets would acquire full rights to the CoolMPS technology in most markets and importantly the key personnel of Complete Genomics such as founder Rade Drmanac.  Complete Genomics will remain the branding for Swiss Rockets' genomics business.  So the question arises, will this be a deal which fixes Complete's issues in a manner as solid as a nice hunk of Gruyère, or will it be as full of holes as a delicious wedge of Emmental?

Ultima Genomics Solaris 2.0: Greater Version, Smaller Beads, Lose A Box

Ultima Genomics announced the 2.0 version of their Solaris chemistry at AGBT.  Perhaps the biggest splash here is that Solaris 2.0 relies on an isothermal amplification chemistry operating on smaller beads, making a path to higher numbers of reads per wafer and eliminating the separate (and very large) emulsion PCR instrument.