A two-year stint at SeraCare comes to an end A little over two years ago I wrote a post called ‘One door opens, and another door closes’ about my moving from Life Technologies / Thermo Fisher Scientific over to a small in-vitro diagnostic controls and reference material company SeraCare Life Sciences. […]
We are living in a world of exponential technologies, and genomics is one of several where expectations are not set at something 30% better or cheaper or faster, but 300% within the space of a few years. The term ‘exponential’ is starting to gain traction in the general public; here […]
One way the world of work has changed with the advent of social media has been the immediacy and intimacy of information. Immediate, as the ability to push ‘tweet’ or ‘publish’ sends your message or blog post out into the vast reaches of electronic communication; and intimate, as social media […]
What does Google X have to offer in life science diagnostic development? I’ve picked up a phrase, ‘it’s a narrow world’, from somewhere in my travels. Way back in my laboratory manager days in Santa Monica California at the John Wayne Cancer Institute (‘laboratory manager’ sounds so much better than […]
“You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.” – Yogi Berra Two years ago when I started this blog I had a few goals – one was to educate and inform, another to build connections, and a third to […]
WaferGen is a California Bay-Area company that originally developed an idea similar to BioTrove, which was to create a solid substrate with nanoliter-sized wells for high throughput real-time PCR. WaferGen’s SmartChip™ has 5,184 wells (that’s a 54 multiple of 96), while BioTrove’s OpenArray™ has 3,072 (that’s a 32 multiple of […]
There has been a lot of publicity around the NextSeq 500 from Illumina, and it appears to have been designed to compete directly against Ion Torrent’s upcoming PII chip. Thanks to a visit to upstate New York last week, I met Dr. Sridar Chittur who told me how important it […]
Another interesting single-molecule technology is a company out of Providence (RI) called Nabsys. For several years I had heard the name involved in developing single-molecule sequencing technology, and this technology will start its initial product around genomic mapping, rather than sequencing. For background on genomic mapping and CNV analysis along […]
“The future is already here – it is just not very evenly distributed.” William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and the person who coined the term ‘cyberspace’. Way back in 2006 or so when I was working for Illumina, the personal genetics firm 23andMe launched their whole-genome genotyping service (called ‘Genetic Testing […]
Almost a year ago I wrote up this post about a startup called BioNano Genomics, which was hard at work launching a nanofluidic device and scanner called the Irys™. At February’s AGBT meeting in Marco Island (FL), they presented a scientific poster about the spider mite genome. Tetranychus urticae has […]
There are two next-generation sequencing ‘platforms’ (i.e. systems) that are being prepared for commercial launch; one from QIAGEN (that I wrote about here and I was told at ASHG that they working hard to launch it in 2014), and another from GnuBIO. This technology came out of the same laboratory […]
The American Society for Human Genetics 2013 Annual Meeting was held this week in Boston. Starting from Tuesday and going through Saturday, there are ancillary meetings both before and after (and Life Technologies had an Ion World event the two days prior). As one of the two ‘main event’ trade-show […]
