I first saw - very briefly - Rade Drmanac back in the early 90s when I was a graduate student, as he was leaving George Church's office. At the time they were friendly rivals, each with their own approach to sequencing. Both approaches - Church's multiplex version of Maxam-Gilbert and Drmanac's sequencing-by-hybridization. - involved repetitive probing and I remember George joking that he thought the genome would be sequenced by hybridization, just not by Drmanac's method. Drmanac mentioned to me last week that George played a key role in Drmanac getting funding at one tight spot - so they were definitely friendly rivals.
George ended up developing polony sequencing and Rade went through a series of companies trying to develop sequencing-by-hybridization - I explored one once for some now forgotten Millennium Pharmaceuticals project. Eventually they joined forces in the founding of Complete Genomics, which would build high efficiency sequencing factories - which I wrote about back in 2009. But that business plan didn't work out and Complete was in trouble by 2012 and was then acquired by China's BGI. That acquisition didn't encounter severe headwinds at the time - though I know people who said it should have been blocked - and also represented BGI's full split from an originally large and close relationship with Illumina.
In the years since, BGI experimented with different corporate arrangements, first creating MGI to handle all commercial affairs. So the Complete Genomics brand faded away. Then at 2023 AGBT at the Diplomat in Hollywood Florida, the name came back. But some weren't convinced it was real change - one lab directory remarked to me "so that's what they're calling themselves this year?".
And since the sale the relationship between China and the USA has become increasingly frosty, with both sides vying for geopolitical and economic dominance amid a surge in nationalism in both polities. Fears of genetic data misuse and abuse have also risen, with routine insinuations that Complete Genomics represents a privacy and intellectual leak risk - a charge that Complete's personnel routinely try to bat down by pointing out their sequencers need not phone home. This has culminated in legislation in the US which explicitly targets specific Chinese companies, including BGI/MGI/Complete Genomics. Apparently some US states have piled on as well, banning use of Complete's instruments for human sequencing. The shadow of an eventual ban has definitely hindered Complete selling into the US, and with various long reach clauses in US laws potentially threatens the ability of non-US entities to conduct business in the US. Now there is a US administration that revels in being unpredictable and in not adhering to any previous standards of conduct or in many cases flouting existing laws. And in any case laws can be rewritten, amended or superseded by new laws - so the playing field is not predictable.
So the acquisition by Swiss Rockets is intended to free Complete Genomics from the threat of corporate assassination via regulation. As a Swiss entity, the company should be out from this specter, right?
Except at first Swiss Rockets won't be much more than a distributor of MGI's manufactured instruments and consumables. Drmanac assured me that there are full plans to take over all research, development, and manufacturing operations, but clearly that can't happen instantaneously. There's also the matter of disentangling all of the management and technical ties between Complete Genomics and MGI, which operated in a very interconnected fashion.
And there's the business ties that will remain as the agreement sets out. Complete Genomics will pay royalties back to MGI on all sales. Complete Genomics will also remain a distributor for the rest of the MGI product catalog - only CoolMPS is moving completely over to Complete Genomics (well, except for Asia-Pacific countries). So there may still be plenty of fodder for intense US nationalists to say this is just a layer of fondue over what is still a Chinese operation. Never mind that so many US products - such as my iPhone - are manufactured in China or that China has invested deeply in US financial markets.
The antibody-based detection method of CoolMPS is, well, pretty cool. (as I wrote back in 2020) It's typical termination chemistry, but no fluorophores on the terminators but instead some sort of moieties which can be distinguished by the fluor-labeled antibodies. The CoolMPS 600 performs an unusual 1x600 midi-read chemistry. Complete Genomics will also get rights to the cool single tube Long Fragment Read (stLFR) linked read technology.
Swiss Rockets had previously announced the CoolMPS 600 instrument, with projected specifications of dual flowcells with 1x600 chemistry generating 2.4 terabases of output in 2 day runs and a cost per 100 gigabases (aka a 30X human genome) for under $100 if fully batched.
So will the acquisition shift attitudes in the US? The lab director I quoted above wasn't the only one I've heard say they would not consider Complete's products - but those informal queries were before the sale to Swiss Rockets. Will labs take a wait-and-see approach to not be caught by any potential re-targeting of the venture by US lawmakers? Will labs be willing to buy CoolMPS 600 but not the other, still fully MGI products, that made the Complete Genomics line very interesting, such as the STOmics just acquired) spatial sequencing or the very high throughput and low throughput instruments?
And of course this is at a time in which Roche and Element are injecting new instruments into the sequencing world which will further complicate the capital budget calculus of every genomics laboratory.
So perhaps complex and chaotic - but when has the sequencing market ever run smoothly like a fine Swiss clock?
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