[steinmann]

Second, Life is a huge company, sequencing is only a certain part of it.

Yes! And a fairly small part as of now. But the sequencing market is large enough to become a major part of it.

Third, Life's CEO is one of the worst person to execute plan and one of the best to oversell something.

Why would you think so?

Let's look at this race again, the race for market share (because there is a finite number of room for new sequencers, believe me). Where does this race take you... The manufacturing of instruments that do more, faster at a lower cost than the market can accept. A zero dollar machine at zero dollar cost that runs a genome in 0 seconds, sadly, will still not fit in a proper hospital pathology workflow (and please stop telling me Anderson or Mayo does it, that's not the global market).

Now take a look at the R&D spending for these new machines, take a look at the acquisition cost of Ion Torrent, the huge debt of solid. Now look at what their plan is: Make more machines at a lower cost using lower costs reagents for bigger results... That's a direct line to lower revenues... not your best business model.

That whole part makes little sense to me. You talk like building cheaper and better devices than your competitor would be a recipe for economic failure.

[Elcannibal]

Hi, all.
I think all available genomic sequencing methods are running neck to neck. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Neither LIFE nor ILLUMINA has overwhelming advantages.
In detail, PGM has lower running cost (labour cost not included), but it also has longer preparation time, as mentioned by someone above. And its biggest shortage is monopolymer recalling, which happens to be the advantage of illumina.

Again, all this is good but has absolutely no influence on how an institutional investor will buy a block or not...

[Elcannibal]

PGM can handle low diversity runs, something the MiSeq struggles with. Amplicon runs or samples for RNA-editing would be good to reason to have a PGM around.

Sure, but that doesn't move a stock...

[Elcannibal]

Going back to your original question, the answer is NO. First off, you are better paying your house or buying one than any other stock. Second, Life is a huge company, sequencing is only a certain part of it. Third, Life's CEO is one of the worst person to execute plan and one of the best to oversell something.

Let's look at this race again, the race for market share (because there is a finite number of room for new sequencers, believe me). Where does this race take you... The manufacturing of instruments that do more, faster at a lower cost than the market can accept. A zero dollar machine at zero dollar cost that runs a genome in 0 seconds, sadly, will still not fit in a proper hospital pathology workflow (and please stop telling me Anderson or Mayo does it, that's not the global market).

Now take a look at the R&D spending for these new machines, take a look at the acquisition cost of Ion Torrent, the huge debt of solid. Now look at what their plan is: Make more machines at a lower cost using lower costs reagents for bigger results... That's a direct line to lower revenues... not your best business model.

Basically NGS at Life is in the red and growing slowly. The reality is that the cash cow is in good old forensic using capillary... We will never know because they do not want to publish NGS results only...

Life is barely keeping up in the single digit growth... that's pretty sad considering the massive cut backs and spending freeze they always have out there.

Long gone are the days of the biotech bubble my friend... this baby is saturated. I bought CRA at 12 and sold at 109$... what a joke that was...

[epistatic]

PGM can handle low diversity runs, something the MiSeq struggles with. Amplicon runs or samples for RNA-editing would be good to reason to have a PGM around.

[greekkey]

Hi, all.
I think all available genomic sequencing methods are running neck to neck. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Neither LIFE nor ILLUMINA has overwhelming advantages.
In detail, PGM has lower running cost (labour cost not included), but it also has longer preparation time, as mentioned by someone above. And its biggest shortage is monopolymer recalling, which happens to be the advantage of illumina.

[Mirth]

More on accuracy check out time point 18:29

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ-UXkoK9ZE&feature=relmfu

[Mirth]

In terms of error rates for PGM and possibly Proton

Hi All,

Very interesting thread. I came across this youtube video that shows how Ion Torrent has improved with respect to accuracy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2s-16r_xCw&feature=relmfu

[MrGuy]

Yes, nothing but a claim. But a member of this forum suggested that he had indeed seen such improvements. Posted yesterday in this thread at 2:40 PM but post got lost. Maybe linked to recent instability if this site?

I deleted it since it was nothing but a claim. I'd rather support it with data for you, but didn't feel like making a big deal out of it. Regardless, works fine for what I do, no issues with the latest chemistries or protocols with regards to homopolymers.

[nschuch]

At the moment we still use Illumina over PGM where possible. Around 50% of our costs are labour costs. If you compare the hands on time it takes to do a PGM run (ePCR, OneTouch enrichment, initialise instrument, load chip ~1 day) to set up our MiSeq ~15 minutes then it's a no brainer.

Having prepared samples for Ion Torrent and Miseq I don't think this is a fully fair comparison. Washing and initializing the machines takes the same amount of time. Running ePCR and enrichment with the Ion Torrent is time consuming, but very easy. There's an hour of actual work involved going from prepared libraries to putting the chip in and running the Ion Torrent. Then there are five hours of waiting. You can work on other things during that time.

Paired end is another story. MiSeq is much easier to do paired end on. Considering that our Ion Torrent sales rep told me, in person, that they were disappointed by the quality of the second reads, I'm tempted not to even consider paired-end.

[steinmann]

Yes, nothing but a claim. But a member of this forum suggested that he had indeed seen such improvements. Posted yesterday in this thread at 2:40 PM but post got lost. Maybe linked to recent instability if this site?

MrGuy has just replied to a thread you have subscribed to entitled - Is the Proton a good reason to buy Life Technologies stock? - in the Ion Torrent forum of SEQanswers.

This thread is located at:

http://seqanswers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23235&goto=newpost

Here is the message that has just been posted:
***************
From the data I've produced in the past month or two with the latest chemistries, I have no issues with the sequencing chemistry or specifically the homopolymer issue you are refering to.
***************

[Wallysb01]

Their claim is that the improvements were made through changes in chemistry (since introduction of the 300 bp kit) and base calling algorithm (torrent suite 3.0).

Have we seen any recent data verifying what Ion Torrent put out themselves? I know the rep that comes by our campus pushed this pretty hard, essentially claiming something like, "yes, we aren't as good as illumina with homopolymer issue, but we're good enough that it isn't a big problem anymore."

He showed some slide or another, but don't remember be hugely impressed. If I remember correctly, they still had problems with homopolymers out to 4 bp, though it was reduced from previously. And the situation got bad at 6bp.

[steinmann]

Their claim is that the improvements were made through changes in chemistry (since introduction of the 300 bp kit) and base calling algorithm (torrent suite 3.0).

[adaptivegenome]

This:

http://www.iontorrent.com/lomanpaper

And the recent 400 bp run on the 318 chip:

http://ioncommunity.lifetechnologies.com/community/datasets/datasets_by_chip

Indicate that they have been making fairly impressive improvements when it comes to error rates.

I can't access the dataset without registration but we do have a PGM that we purchased late last year and the homopolymer errors (as well as other indel related errors) are more frequent than with Illumina, something confirmed by the paper you posted.

It will be exciting if this error is reduced on the new machines and particularly the Protons.

[steinmann]

This:

http://www.iontorrent.com/lomanpaper

And the recent 400 bp run on the 318 chip:

http://ioncommunity.lifetechnologies.com/community/datasets/datasets_by_chip

Indicate that they have been making fairly impressive improvements when it comes to error rates.