NGS Expert Blog

The High-Throughput Sequencing map by James Hadfield (Cancer Research UK, Cambridge) gives us a very interesting overview about sequencing activities around the world. We ran a survey to find out if your favourite machines correspond with the platforms listed by James in his overview.

Here are the results: Your personal favourites are nearly a perfect match with platforms in the genome centers worldwide. Great match!

The analyst and sequencing community is currently divided on whether to believe the rumors of a new bid from Roche to buy Illumina. The source of the controversial discussions is an article from the Swiss Newspaper L’Agefi that reported end of December that Roche and Illumina might have agreed to a deal for Roche to acquire Illumina. Since Illumina turned down Roche’s original bid in January, continuous interest from Roche has been reported several times, but the report from L’Agefi is also mentioning concrete amounts of the bid. According to them, the acquisition might take place for $66 per share, valuing the deal at about $8.14 billion in total.

The offer is $15 per share higher than the previous offer of $51 in April last year. According to the analyst Devia Ferreiro of Oppenheimer the new bid is definitely at a level that might lead to a final deal.

With Roche having only about 9% of the NGS market and next generation sequencing becoming most likely an important clinical diagnostic tool in the next years, the strategy focus of Roche must be to get better access to the NGS market and to take NGS to clinical practice. The acquisition of the NGS market leader Illumina represents an optimal starting point.

We’ll see if the rumors are built on a solid foundation within the next two weeks: The Swiss newspaper L’Agefi reported that the announcement might come during the first half of January.

We asked, for which kind of application do you use the Roche GS FLX+, the GS FLX Titanium or GS Junior sequencing technology providing read length of up to 700 bp? 36 people answered the poll:

Please find on the right hand side our new poll and add your voice!

Every now and then I think about writing again about the proposal from Roche to Illumina; but everytime I have the feeling that something fundamental could happen tomorrow. And to be honest – I never expected that this hostile takeover would take so long. It is anyhow fascinating that such huge acquisition plans are discussed in public.

Anyhow the latest news I can share is that Illumina compares itself with the giant “Apple” now. Quite funny is the comment of David Benoit from the WSJ Blogs about that:  “That’s some high talk for a company with a market capitalization of about $6.3 billion, roughly 1/100th the size of Apple.”

But nevertheless I have to endorse the statement of Illumina, since Apple also started as a really small company and due to the enthusiasm of its founders it grew to this giant company. Imagine Microsoft would have bought Apple in their early days? We might still use a normal mobile phone to connect with each other. No iPod, no iPad? So it seems totally clear to me that also the founders of Illumina should fight for their company and the freedom to be self-sustaining.

What do you think – how long will it take until Roche takes over Illumina, or is Illumina strong enough to defense itself?

The June webinar of the free NimbleGen webinar series is talking about
Genome-wide studies of copy number variation and exome sequencing identify rare variants in BAG3 as a cause of dilated cardiomyopathy >

For further information and registration, please visit the NimbleGen website.

Six and five years after the commercial launch of their first next generation sequencers, the companies Roche and Illumina are still at the forefront of the next generation sequencing market. By today, Roche technology has enabled 1209 peer-reviewed publications while Illumina technology has even enabled 1631 publications (from both companies’ websites).

The current sequencer of both companies are the Roche GS FLX with an average read length of 350-450 bp and 400 Mbp data output per run and the Illumina HiSeq 2000 with read length of up to 100 bp and up to 320 Gbp data output per run.

Both companies’ focus on technological improvements is mainly on enhancing read number and read length. Illumina has recently launched the 150 bp read length (for GAIIx only) and has further announced doubling of yield for Q2 in 2011. Roche is planning to launch the extended average read length of 750 bp sometimes before the end of June according to GenomeWeb News on April 19^th, 2011.
In my point of view third generation sequencing will not replace these technologies but enable additional applications as well as combining third generation and second generation technologies for specific project layouts.