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.  

Emulsion PCR is technically clever, but has a long list of haters among those who have practiced it.  Ultima addressed this in their initial chemistry by having a dedicated robot for emulsion PCR.  So that removed much of the objection to dealing with the goop of emulsions - but meant having a second very large instrument as part of the installation.  Plus the cost of the instrument.  And worries about whether the throughput of the emulsion PCR box matches that of the sequencing instrument if you are trying keep everything going flat-out, particularly with shorter read modes that take less sequencing instrument time.

Now Ultima is launching Solaris 2.0 based around an unspecified isothermal amplification technology.  So no more emulsion PCR instrument!  Now the upstream liquid handler used for pooling libraries can run the isothermal amplification as well.  Ultima sells an OpenTrons model configured for these operations, but says that many industry standard liquid handlers can be configured and programmed to accomplish this.  The isothermal chemistry also shows less coverage biasing by %GC, enabling better variant calling in regions of extreme GC.

The beads have shrunk while the wafer stays the same size, so Solaris 2.0 will support a 20 billion read mode.  10B and 5B options will support fewer reads to enable more economical usage.

Ultima also rolled out an upgraded instrument family, the UG200 and UG200Ultra - single wafer and dual wafer processing versions for $850K and $1250K respectively.  The main difference from the UG100 is the UG200 series enables maintaining a queue of 10 wafers instead of 8, allowing a greater degree of walkaway - the system still has the "feed and walk" approach of dual reagent drawers that enable single shift operation by decoupling wafer run times from reagent refills and waste removal.  The new instruments also sport more compute power to deal with the higher data rates.  UG100 users have the option of upgrading to the UG100+, which is primarily around the same compute upgrade.

A full UG200Ultra could process 30 wafers per week of 1x300ish (remember, this is unterminated flow chemistry so not a set read length) at a bit under 12 hours per wafer.  As with the UG100 - and this was shown nicely with the window in the back of the demo UG200Ultra displayed at AGBT - a single optical station is partnered with two chemistry stations.  The chemistry and scanning times are roughly the same, so while one wafer scans the other is advancing by one flow.

Ultima also announced that a paired end chemistry is in early access and will be commercialized by year end.  Ultima's single read chemistry has worked for many sequencing libraries by simply reading all the way through a library molecule, but this can result in data loss with library formats that encode key information on both ends of the molecule.  Losses can occur either from failing to fully read through the "far side" indexing information, or because at that point the basecalling accuracy is poor due to dephasing. 

Ultima presented before Roche, and perhaps that explains the lack of per read / per gigabase pricing messaging.  But when speaking to Ultima CEO Gilad Almogy at the closing dinner, he felt Ultima still had a significant pricing advantage over the announced Axelios-1 consumable costs.