Currently ChatGPT is extracting structured manufacturing information for each company. If you are interested in that let me know (currently token limited).

I’m looking also interested in building this out in other directions. If you have specific features you’d like to see, ping me! (nava@whitefordresearch.com)

There’s a nice video on the website, but this is my simplified interpretation of the process:

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Mark joined in 2021 and was part of a large expansion of the executive team after Christian became CEO. He was COO at PacBio, and previously CCO at Illumina, coming up through sales.

In terms of the overall company trajectory, I’m not sure this changes things massively.

Mark is an insider, and therefore doesn’t seem to signal a huge change in strategy. It was sad to see a significant number of people let go, particular some good folks on the marketing side.

An acquisition seems like the most reasonable way forward, if there is a buyer. This could be a reshuffle prior to that? Any potential acquirer I suppose would want to transition to their own marketing and commercial team…

Only time will tell.

Today someone sent me another Raman company. Haemanthus, founded by Elizabeth Holmes romantic partner.

It would have to be a really good company. A really solid scientific foundation to make up for an even tenuous association to one of the most toxic Biotech companies of the last 50 year. And how does it stack up against VividDx and others.

Who

So who is this Billy Evans and the rest of Haemanthus executive team?

Well he has a BS in Economics and worked at a LIDAR company (Luminar).

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They’ve just raised $15M and have a new CEO.

The basic idea is described on their site (but leaves out a few steps):

Vivid are not the first to suggest using Raman recently we’ve seen:

• Pumpkinseed (Protein Sequencing)

• CanSense (Liquid Biopsy)

• Primary Biosciences (Protein Sequencing)

• Armonica (DNA Sequencing)

But I’m unaware of any significant successes here where single molecule or single cell Raman spectra has been shown to have diagnostic value.

But let’s have a dig around and see what we can find…

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For your consideration:

• 2004 Vintage DNA Sequencing company

• One careful owner (tech enthusiast)

• One not so careful owner. Various after-market modifications (now removed).

• Encumbered title (enquire for details).

• All reasonable offers considered1.

Original owner put this together as a custom build using state of the art parts performance still exceeds current models.

Current owner attempted after-market modifications using parts available on the open market. These negatively impacted the aesthetic and performance and have now been removed.

This is a unique opportunity to own a one of a kind sequencing company at a very reasonable price.

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There are more layoffs at PacBio, mostly around marketing as far as I can tell. Of particular note is Elizabeth Tseng, who put together Pacbio marketing that left more of an impact than… Macklemore.

In addition to Pacbio, it looks like we’re seeing layoffs at DNA Electronics too. Which is a shame as their early access program should be underway.

Chat on the Discord suggests reasonably large RIF at PacBio. The LinkedIn posts I saw suggested layoffs in marketing. The most positive spin I can put on this that it helps position PacBio for an acquisition.

This might be the best outcome for PacBio, a strategic acquisition by someone with deep pockets, willing to support the strong fundamental value that lies in the PacBio technology.

Unfortunately they’d have to be will to resolve all that SoftBank debt1, and it’s not clear that anyone is willing to do that at this point.

Anyway… let’s discuss why Nautilus makes me sad.

All Biotechs Are Beautiful

Part of me is sympathetic to any and all Biotech companies. Because Biotech gets such a small slice of the overall funding pie. If we look at all Biotech exits, my estimates suggest we are somewhere in the $300B/yr range:

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“An example of a sensor technology that is dependent on proximity to the sample is wide-field magnetic imaging with nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond. NV centers exhibit magnetic resonance behavior that depends sensitively on the vector magnetic field and which may be read out optically using light emitted from the NV centers and collected in the far field with imaging optics. This technology may be used to construct high-resolution maps of the vector magnetic field across a wide field of view on the diamond surface…

…NV centers result from the substitution of two adjacent carbon atoms in the diamond lattice with a nitrogen atom and an empty site (a vacancy).

NV magnetic sensing may be performed by observing spin-dependent fluorescence from NV sensors. When excited with green light from the ground electronic state, NV centers emit red fluorescence.”

Pretty incomprehensible to me at first glance, but unpacking it:

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The similarities don’t end there… like Nautilus, Ignite Proteomics appears to be attempting a SPAC.

Aside from the above, I couldn’t see any relationship between the companies however.

Anyway, let’s have poke around and see what we can find out about Ignite Proteomics!

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What’s most interesting to me about the next GeneXpert is that GenomeWeb have reported that it’s a semiconductor based system.

Many folks have suggested semiconductor based platforms. But none of these have made their way to market in any serious way. We should hopefully find out more on in their presentation on the 28th, but until then we’re left to hunt around in patents and speculate.

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Illumina VP for global IP and litigation, wrote in an email. “The German infringement court addressed only infringement allegations and did not consider the validity of the asserted Element patent.”… Illumina’s challenge to the validity of Element’s patent remains pending before the German Federal Patent Court. In addition, the asserted Element patent expires on January 30, 2028.

But this still leaves it pretty vague as to what the IP actually refers to. Looking at the patents:

US8612161B2: This seems to cover phasing corrections. That is some strands don’t incorporate (lagging) and some multiply incorporate. So you get a convolved signal, and you can correct for this. Patent was filed in 2009, Illumina/Solexa have been using phasing corrections since the Genome Analyzer was introduced in 2006.

US8623598B2: Seems to relate mostly to specific scavengers.

US9909174B2: Very broad claims on sequencing-by-synthesis.

US11001887B2: Very broad claims on sequencing-by-synthesis .

US156563071: Pretty broad claims.

It’s unclear to me what is supposed to be part of the MiSeq here that was not also in the Genome Analyzer. We can get a better sense from the US lawsuit which describe Elements position. Element acquired the right to litigate this IP which originally came from Qiagen from PhenomeX Inc. and IsoPlexis.

In that litigation they claim that Illumina phasing corrections infringe:

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In particular PromethION growth fell from a massive 59% in H1 2025 to just 15%. I suspect this is because, as I wrote last year, a lot of this was down to how they structure financing options.

They ended H1 with £234.5M in the bank, down from £302.8M in December. Just under 2 years of runway. They still “expect to achieve adjusted EBITDA breakeven during FY27”. But I don’t understand how they hope to achieve profitability by 2027.

They appear to have had ~1300 employees at the end of 2025. I don’t think we’ve seen any significant layoffs yet in 2026. Losses are down a little, but not enough to make their way to zero in a year1:

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• Research Tools2

• Therapeutics3

• Industrial Applications4

• Diagnostics

A lot of the things claiming to be diagnostics, end up being research tools. A lot of the others are better in a way nobody really cares about and fail5.

Some don’t work at all.

Others end up being novel and interesting! Which camp does today’s company iXpressGenes fall into!

iXpressGenes is developing “RT-qPCR RNA Gene Expression Panel for Inflammation & Neuroinflammation”. Technically this doesn’t sound very challenging. There doesn’t seem to be any novel technology in the readout. But a solid RNA based readout for inflammation

iXpressGenes couldn’t have a more shocking origin story:

“In 2010, the founder of iXpressGenes, Dr. Joe Ng—a molecular biologist and professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville—was in a routine faculty meeting. Tragedy struck when a colleague pulled a handgun from her handbag and murdered three people in front of him. Joe fortunately survived but in the aftermath, he witnessed a haunting spectrum of resilience among his colleagues.”

The event in question appears to be the 2010 University of Alabama shooting. The CEOs testimony to congress expands on trauma to PTSD and suggested they provide an objective measure:

“PTSD and trauma-related illness have long been treated based on symptoms and subjective reports. But now, with RNA transcriptome analysis, we can assess it objectively—offering a novel approach for diagnosing, treating, and even preventing trauma-induced disease.”

This makes me a little skeptical. Being objective is a great quality for a metric. But it seems more important that it accurately measures underlying trauma.

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Both Aplex and Rarity use Padlock probes, and RCA. But unlike Rarity, Aplex have a surface based readout. The process is described well on their website:

The RCAs are labelled with what they call “nanopixels” super-bright labels which enable 100-plex with ~6 color detection. The result is a dPCR-like technology with high plex.

I want to dig a little deeper into how this is implement. And fortunately they have some well written patents…

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Carbon nanotubes fluoresce in the NIR range. And it’s clear from the site that this is being used for detection but the site just says a “measurable fluctuation” is detected when enzymes interact with the nanotubes.

That means I’m left to go hunting for patents and other information!

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But today I came across a new one I’d never heard of! BioCompute! There are two fairly unique aspects to BioComputes approach.

Storage

“Our proprietary enzymatic process “edits” data onto naturally abundant DNA templates. It operates at room temperature, allowing for massive parallelization without the energy costs of heat-cycling.”

I couldn’t find any patents associated with BioCompute and there isn’t much beyond the above statement on their website. But looking at their github and TED talk suggests they are applying methylation to natural DNA strands on encode data.

I don’t see an easy high throughput way of encoding information in methylation. You could use a mixture of methyltransferases to methylate sites on strands. I would suspect this is what they might be doing in a proof-of-concept.

This fuzzy poster from BioCompute that helps us out a little:

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These are all very interesting, but recently I’ve been trying to dig out companies that use weirder detection approaches (including dogs).

This led me to Allumbra who ah:

“combines a quantum sensing technology with AI to extract rich molecular information”

Which sounds fun. I’ve often found myself lying in bed wondering:

“did I leave the stove on?”…“what if we could just combine quantum sensing technology with AI to extract rich molecular information”…“I wonder if there’s any banana cake3 left…”.

By “Quantum” they mean Raman it seems. And by rich molecular information, they mean Raman spectra... Digging further,

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They appear to be launching globally, and we’ve had pilots in America, Europe and Asia-Pacific1 suggesting the infrastructure is in place to do this.

Technically, this launch announcement is fairly meaningless, as it seems like they’ve been recognizing revenue already. But it sets the timer running on analyst and user expectations.

Even 100 instruments shipped in the first year (and perhaps more importantly, reasonable pull-through on reagents), will not generate meaningful revenue for Roche. But it may hurt Illumina, make the analysts happy, and increase user confidence.

The user confidence is likely the most critical factor for Roche. Really Roche need one of two things here:

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