Article preview from Medtech Insight - February , 2012
In 2011, sequencing was once again the big story in diagnostics. But unlike 2010 when the big news was the successful IPOs of next-generation sequencing companies Pacific Biosciences and Complete Genomics, the tone in 2011 was more nuanced.
Article preview from Medtech Insight - February , 2012
In the 1967 movie classic The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman gets a one-word piece of career-planning advice from a family friend: “plastics.” For diagnostics in 2011, that word would have to be sequencing. But unlike 2010 when the big news was the successful IPOs of next-generation sequencing companies Pacific Biosciences of California Inc. and Complete Genomics Inc., owing to the downturn in government funding and a slow economy, the tone in 2011 was more nuanced. Share prices of sequencing market leaders Illumina Inc. and Life Technologies Corp. fell roughly 50% and 30%, respectively, in 2011. PacBio dropped more than 80% and Complete Genomics 60%, although the latter did manage to complete a secondary offering at $12.50 in June, more than 4X its current price.
More than a slowdown in instrument placements is affecting these instrument makers, however, and much of that spells good news for gene-based clinical diagnostics. Commoditization and the continuing rapid drop in the costs of sequencing, leading to increased competition, may be putting pressure on these toolmakers. But lower costs and improved accuracy are enabling looks at whole genomes and the ability to amass the large data sets that will be needed to validate complex diagnostic tests. As geneticist Dietrich Stephan, PhD, commented: “The writing is on the wall that the technology that powers molecular diagnostics will collapse onto a one-shot assay once it gets cheap enough,” and it will be less expensive from a workflow perspective than managing thousands of primer sets and capillary based sequencers. “We’re seeing it get close already,” he says, with the cost of an exome now around $900.
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