NGS Expert Blog

It seems that Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) is as seasonal or innovative as fashion. Early this year Oxford Nanopore Technologies announced a revolutionising technology where NGS can be performed on very small sequencers in USB-Stick format.  Just recently Complete Genomics reported about a new technology, named Long Fragment Read (LFR). LFR enables to increase the sequencing accuracy by 10-fold and reduces the amount of starting material at the same time. Additonally QIAGEN disclosed the acquisition of Intelligent Bio-Systems Inc. (IBS). A previously undisclosed NGS benchtop sequencing instrument, combining IBS and QIAGEN technology will be launched soon. The main focus of this technology is the processing of multiple samples in parallel. I am looking forward to learn more about this technology, which seems to have some things in common with the Illumina technology, since Illumina just sued QIAGEN for infringement of NGS patents.

So do we have an excess in development for Next Generation Sequencing or do we need more? My personal opinion is that innovation is the source of science and that it is important to develop new technologies. But it remains fascinating if and when any of the new technologies will replace any of the currently used technologies, like Roche GS FLX or Illumina. I’ll keep you updated.

Earlier this year Oxford Nanopore Technologies presented their solution for Next Generation Sequencing: the MinIon & GridIon instruments outranges the current available techniques like Illumina or Roche systems by read length, hands on time and pricing. But since the technology is not launched yet, we don’t know if these specs are realistic.

This is why we asked you about your opinion in our latest poll (Nanopore sequencing from Oxford Nanopore Technologies sounds really fascinating. What is your opinion regarding this technology?). More than 50 voters took part in this survey and 42% share my opinon: “I prefer to wait and check out the real system before judging it”.

“Paper doesn’t blush” is what 15% think of this announcement – like every other company the first presentation needs to be spectacular, but let’s see what happens when the instrument is really on the market.

And still some of you are convinced that this will change a lot in the NGS market – and I agree it would be great if it turns out to be true.

Some of you haven’t heard about this technology – so if you are interested to learn more about it you might start by reading our recent blog post about it.

Thanks again to all you participated in our voting and please have a look at our new poll.

In the last weeks we were continuously following the hostile bid from Roche for Illumina. Now, after the shareholder meeting, Roche didn’t extend the offer and let Illumina from the hook – for the moment?
However, this could also be good news. From my point of view there is a wide range of applications that work best with the FLX technology. In order to be competitive with all other NGS technologies Roche needs to invest more in FLX+. After launching the upgrade last year they faced continuously problems with the performance of the technique as highlighted for example in an article in InSequence last week.

I think, because the NGS future of Roche is again more focussed on FLX+, they will work even harder to get the long reads up an running on every GS FLX site – maybe a FLX+ upgrade for the GS Junior might be possible soon.

Of course it also might be that they are looking for an alternative for Illumina as highlighted by Julia Karow and Monica Heger. However, all possiblities discussed in this article – a cooperation with Life (Ion Torrent), an acquisition of Oxford Nanopore technologies or the development of a brand new technique might not be as scary for the FLX technology as Illumina because all technologies are “very early in the commercialization”.

Scarcely any biotech blog and bulletin is not reporting about Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinIon & GridIon.

Truly, the specs of the new instruments sound fantastic: read length up to 100 kbp, raw read error rate ~1%, no sample preparation necessary (at least with blood samples), RNA can be sequenced directly, costs per base comparable to competitors, only 900$ for the MinIon device and data production in the range of 20-400 bases / second / pore (GenomeWeb).

And it goes without saying that these new instruments cause a lot of fuss in the Next Generation Community: shares from competitors are down up to 6 percent, and every one discusses fictive scenarios that might now be possible.

I am also really excited about this news and it still sound unbelievable that Next Gen Sequencing devices can be so small. But I also have my doubts  and agree with the following statements:

“… If only 75% of what they claimed is true it would be impressive.” (Pathogenomics)

“…that new DNA sequencers, like everything else in life, often look better when they’re vapourware.”(Forbes)

What is definitely true is that you really have to read also the small prints at the bottom of the page. You cannot, for example, use the USB-Stick-like device “MinIon” to sequence the complete genome in 15 minutes. You would need to run 20 GridIon instruments or “nodes” in parallel to achieve this turnaround time with a coverage of 50x.

So it is definitely fascinating what might be possible with the MinIon – just think about the point-of-care market, where we would need small, disposable devices to work on site. But still you should be able to interpret the data and I look forward to learning how they will solve this issue. And furthermore I am even more curious what kind of instruments we will be using in 5 years: Smaller or faster ones or something completely different? What do you think?

Oxford Nanopore Technologies Ltd.