Just what is “Next Generation Technologist” about anyway? 1


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“The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.” – William Gibson

This is a blog about next-generation sequencing and it’s intersection with marketing and business in general (primarily), which happens to be my particular area of professional expertise, having focused on next-generation sequencing since late 2006, when Illumina (my then-employer) acquired a startup called Solexa for $417M. I have had product development, product management, marketing (all in the San Diego area with Illumina) and key-account sales roles (in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US serving both the NIH and the entire SouthEast region with Illumina, RainDance Technologies and currently with Life Technologies). I am presently in a marketing role at Life Technologies Corporation (which used to be Applied Biosystems and Invitrogen Corporation), heavily involved with both the Ion Torrent PGM / Proton as well as the SOLiD / 5500 platforms. (More information about me can be found here; if you are interested in anything Ion Torrent and NGS market overall you’ve come to the right place.)

Consider (for a moment) the specialized expertise required of a life sciences vendor, particularly in the competitive capital equipment arena. To produce a product (say a microarray scanner or next-generation sequencing instrument) a company would need engineering expertise around optical imaging, chemical expertise around fluorescent marker chemistry, biochemical expertise for assays that use such chemistry, software expertise to analyze and extract quantitative data from such images, and then additional bioinformatics expertise to not only present the data in an acceptable method for the scientific customer, but also keep up with feature requirements, documentation, and support, not to mention bug fixes! In the midst of all this complexity, there’s a fast-moving market, with both customers attracted to the latest technology to implement the latest methods, as well as new and entrenched competition going after your market niche. It is this kind of market dynamics which I thoroughly enjoy – and high barriers to entry (both from the new competitive corporate entrant side, as well as from the personnel side) doesn’t hurt this picture either.

This is, however, also a personal blog – reflecting my own personal interests. (There is more to life than work!) So this blog will explore business problems and marketing trends, observations from my travels (both around North America and across the offline and online reading I come across), some items that make my life easier (for fellow frequent travelers with a busy schedules), and some cool emerging products and technologies that you just might find interesting as well.

What are the goals for this blog?

Frankly, it boils down to just a few:

  • Provide an outlet to educate, inform, and entertain. 🙂
  • Build connections across the scientific and business communities
  • Initiate discussion, conversation and food-for-thought (as a long-time consumer of information, it’s about time I started being a producer)
  • Gain experience in a long-delayed project, which was to learn Python, JavaScript, CSS etc. as it applies to web programming

I may end up with a few other goals, perhaps something along the lines of ‘Start a foundation to solve some incredibly difficult problem’, but that may be better served by those better equipped (ahem, and better-financed, cough) than I am at the present.

So I would ask that you subscribe by email or RSS feed (to keep informed of new posts), to follow me on Twitter  (@daleyuzuki), to like and repost anything useful you find here on your FaceBook page, and to pass along links to your LinkedIn associates. I would also appreciate it if you would take the time to reply with comments or questions, either to the post or to me directly through the ‘Contact Me’ link at the top right. There are so many helpful resources available, and I make myself available as one of many.


About Dale Yuzuki

A sales and marketing professional in the life sciences research-tools area, Dale currently is employed by Olink as their Americas Field Marketing Director. https://olink.com For additional biographical information, please see my LinkedIn profile here: http://www.linkedin.com/in/daleyuzuki and also find me on Twitter @DaleYuzuki.

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