Rman,
I attended a Hyseq presentation today, and they seemed quite confident their sequencing technology is much more powerful than anyone else. I don't have their slides, nor did I take careful notes, but my walkaway opinion was they felt they had about a 10x cost advantage with their robotic systems over gel-based systems.
I'm hopelessly ignorant at this point in this area ... trying to get up to speed ... so for now I'm hearing with naive ears, and may misread data. But here goes.
They also said they sample up to 500k times per tissue, vs. INCY 10k. Since the average tissue has 300k RNA, they feel they get the infrequently expressed genes.
They were a little secretive, but they said they've got ESTs and many full length clones from more than 100k genes, and rapidly closing on the genome, with their estimate of 150k genes at the end of the day. They also have lots of tissue sources, and are learning lots about gene expression levels vs various disease states. They have a collaboration with UCSF to look at tissues from 20k patients, and will then correlate disease conditions with expression levels.
all in all, this bioinformatics / genomics hayseed was pretty impressed. btw, they didn't bash INCY at all ... they ceded the database market to them, and expressed [sic] a lot of respect for INCY's business model.
thoughts?
Peter |
