| Author | Message | ||
     Entrepreneur Kurra Bewarse Username: Entrepreneur Post Number: 3009 Registered: 05-2011 Posted From: 65.35.45.47 Rating: N/A |
PacBio's Renewed Energy When confronted by antitrust regulators last year, the core thesis of Illumina and Pacific Biosciences was that PacBio could not survive as an independent company. After giving up on the merger, PacBio decided to dispute their own thesis -- and seem to be succeeding so far. As highlighted at their recent "Global Summit" meeting, they have a new CEO, new financing and a burnished product offering. I don't like to spend much time looking at stock prices, but if you want a clear sign of renewed optimism in the company look at their two stock offerings this year -- 19.4M shares offered at $4.47 in August and mid November another 7.4M shares at $14.25 -- so half as many shares sold at almost three times the price per share! For those wondering, I do not hold positions in any company in the space, though results like that certainly challenge my focus on broad index funds. PacBio has also refreshed their C-suite. Genomics instrumentation trailblazer Michael Hunkapillar retired in favor of former Illumina executive Christian Henry (in the full disclosure department: Henry sits on the Board of Directors of my employer) --which was forshadowed by him being made Chairman of the Board earlier in the year. Exiting earlier was the Senior Vice President of Research, Michael Phillips, succeeded by an internal promotion. Susan G Kim, whose previous experience is in tech not biotech, took over as CFO soon after Henry's elevation to CEO. On the third quarter conference call, Henry spoke extensively about expanding the sales and marketing group with at least a doubling in size. On the product front, this fall PacBio announced the Sequel IIe, which extends the existing Sequel II instrument with on-board computation. IIe's built-in silicon can rapidly compute the HiFi reads that are clearly where PacBio thinks the market excitement is, eliminating the requirement (and complexity) to transfer raw data off the instrument to a cluster and then compute a consensus. This also shaves time off the computation. On the other hand, this is pretty much all it supports right now -- underscoring that PacBio seens HiFi reads as their prime selling point and not methylation detection. Across the board the PacBio software now supports uploading data to the cloud. Cloud capabilities can be easily overhyped, but here it matters. When queueing multiple samples, there was previously a limit imposed by the onboard storage -- it was easily possible to choose a combination of queued samples and movie times that would overwhelm it. With offload to the cloud, one has unlimited storage. Now if only the system supported hot-swapping of samples to enable essentially continuous sequencing! I watched some of the talks at the Global Summit and if you have a chance it is well worth taking in the scientific talks. A challenge with not being physically present is it is harder to pretend that conflicting work duties can be shirked until one's return. But in any case, the outside scientific presentations demonstrated all sorts of clever uses of HiFi reads, though there certainly were more than a few mentions of other platforms. 15-25 kilobase reads with 1% or less error rates really opens up some cool possibilities. One paper noted in a company presentation showed a 12 kilobase inversion in monozygotic twins leading to a developmental phenotype. PacBio also just nailed down a collaboration with Invitae for pediatric epilepsy diagnostics, demonstrating buy-in by an established genome-based diagnostics company. |