Ugh. I let the month of April slip away without writing and now have almost let May do the same. But some leftover euphoria from a huge experimental breakthrough on our current diagnostics project at the Gene Factory plus the feeling I shouldn't let news tied into an earlier post slip off, and here I am. When I wrote about sequencer startups back in February based on their websites, I put Stratos Genomics near the front of the pack. Roche Molecular apparently agrees, announcing a week ago...

AGBT ended over a week ago and I've been procrastinating ever since in going through notes and writing up companies. First few days I had the excuse of family time on beautiful Sanibel Island to the north, but since Monday other than obsessing about COVID-19 (and cancelling travel plans) I have no excuses. First up, the microfluidic library prep company Miroculus, based on my notes from talking to their Chief Commercial Officer, Adam Lowe Miroculus unveiled at AGBT their Miro Canvas system....

This past fall there was a rumor that QIAGEN was being pursued by an acquirer, with the initial tip being scientific conglomerate ThermoFisher but then other possibilities floated by. QIAGEN was seen as ripe for such an action as their long-time CEO had stepped down. QIAGEN made a very public announcement that they would continue independently under their new CEO, but that is no longer the case: ThermoFisher will acquire them, pending regulatory approvals, for something around 11.5B If I had...

At some fancy restaurants one can get a "deconstructed dish". As I understand it, as I don't frequent such restaurants, a deconstructed BLT would have the bread, bacon, lettuce and tomato each as their own individual item, but prepared in a novel way which highlights the strengths of each ingredient. When I got a preview last night of Rade Drmanac's closing AGBT talk on achieving a $100 human genome (reagents price only), that was the vision I had: Drmanac and his team have created their Tx...

There are cases in which one virus depends on another virus being present. in humans, hepatitis delta virus requires co-infection with hepatitis B virus.This results in less production of new hepatitis B visions but a more severe form of the disease for the patient. There are examples in plants of such systems that are three viruses deep