Oxford Nanopore announcement sets sequencing sector abuzz

them appealing to Roche, who sees Illumina’s technology as a potentially powerful adjunct to their diagnostics business—especially as their own sequencing property, 454, recedes in importance in the market. Illumina has urged its shareholders to resist Roche’s offer of $44.50 per share, which remains well below the current stock value. “It’s validating that Roche sees our technology as valuable,” says Greg Heath, senior vice president of diagnostics at Illumina. “[But] the price point is relatively opportunistic.” Nevertheless, analysts expect Roche to play the long game to close the deal based on the company’s past acquisitions history, even if further price negotiations prove necessary. Other technologies are also emerging to challenge the supremacy of Illumina’s flagship HiSeq family of genome and exome sequencing instruments. “Illumina has done a really fantastic job of making things better, cheaper and faster,” says Quintin Lai, managing director at Robert W. Baird & Co., a financial services firm in Milwakee. “The challenge for them is that others are sitting there going: ‘Hey, that’s the blueprint!’” Ion Torrent, acquired in 2010 by Life Technologies, poses the most immediate threat with their semiconductor-based sequencing systems. This past January, the company announced the launch of the Ion Proton, which will deliver high-throughput, whole-genome and exome sequencing capabilities at an instrument cost of under $150,000 (although purchase of a dedicated server will also be required). Projected per-experiment costs are $1,000 per whole genome and $500 per exome, although the Proton chips themselves will not be commercially available until later in the year. Nevertheless, the overall success of Ion Torrent’s earlier machine, the Personal Genome Machine—primarily intended for targeted resequencing or the analysis of smaller genomes—has given observers confidence that Proton will deliver. “Part of Ion’s success has been setting milestones and meeting or exceeding them,” says Lai. According to founder and CEO Jonathan Rothberg, the inherent design of Ion Torrent instruments also means that they have the potential to maintain a consistent edge with regard to speed and cost. “The HiSeq is tion is intensifying to push accurate, low-cost sequencing into the clinical space. A steady stream of money is now flowing into efforts to apply whole-genome and exome sequencing toward the development of patient-specific treatment strategies, with numerous medical schools and hospitals forming centers focused on personalized medicine. This past winter the US National Human Genome Research Institute issued more than $10 million in funding for Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research Projects to investigators at six different institutions. “The rate at which this is actually happening is vastly exceeding our expectations,” says Richard Gibbs, director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Illumina has an early edge; through a combination of strong technology and business savvy, the company has secured roughly 60% of the next-generation sequencing market. “They’ve been very aggressive about pushing out product cycles,” says Tycho Peterson, analyst at JP Morgan in New York City. “They’ve done a very good job of evolving their platform and stratifying the instrument portfolio and listening to customer needs.” This strength has made In February, UK startup Oxford Nanopore Technologies took the sequencing community by storm when it introduced at the annual Advances in Genome Biology & Technology (AGBT) meeting in Marco Island, Florida, two nanopore sequencing platforms (the GridION and MinION) capable of delivering high-throughput, ultra-long sequence reads at low cost. The MinION generated particular excitement as a memory key–sized disposable unit that can be plugged into a laptop for under $1,000, according to the company. Although no peer-reviewed studies validating the company’s claims had been published as Nature Biotechnology went to press, insiders are excited about the possibilities of a low-cost, compact sequencing instrument with the capability of reading millions of DNA base pairs per hour, with only minimal preparation, even from blood samples. As Oxford’s technology goes up against the other leading instrument providers, such as Carlsbad, California–based Life Technologies’ Ion Proton or San Diego based Illumina’s HiSeq 2500, Swiss giant Roche made a $5.7 billion move for Illumina. Roche’s hostile takeover effort had yet to play out at the time of publication, but what is clear is that competiOxford nanopore announcement sets sequencing sector abuzz