Friday, July 3, 2015

Commentary: 50 Smartest Companies

I have to admit, I was a little surprised when the MIT Tech Review had 15 / 50 companies in the Biotech sector, specifically the genomics ecosystem, from the big bad of NGS instrumentation Illumina to relatively small analysis shops like DNAnexus

Is 2015 really the year of genomics biotech?

The gains (infographic) in raw throughput are indeed very impressive, but I’m skeptical:

Analysis/interpretation >> Point-of-care/Portable >> “High-throughput”

2636 genomes! 100k genomes! 1M genomes!

Maybe China will throw its hat in the ring and spring for 1B genomes. Maybe folks will get serious about somatic variation and spring for 1k genomes from an individual.

IMHO, it seems like an over-hyped pissing contest of who can pay Illumina (sequencing), AWS (compute) and Oracle/IBM (data-centers) the most.

Hopefully, I’ll be proven wrong, tax payers may rejoice in money not flushed and the Tech Review can be vindicated.