An AWS For Sequencing?

Recently I was having a conversation about software based sequencing businesses. In general Bioinformatics plays have been a massive failure (unless they are supporting some other strategic play in tools)¹.

But there are a few Bioinformatics companies that have a slightly different model. They take a sample, sequencing it, and provide analysis based on the sequence data.

But how are they software business you might ask? They doing sequencing? They require… sequencers don’t they?

Well, the same way that Reddit is a software company and doesn’t need to run servers instead. They use a service provider, like AWS, to provide their infrastructure.

So a company like Nebula will ship consumer samples directly to an external service provider. They then receive the data and provide analysis as a value add.

There are a number of DNA sequencing service providers to choose from. They all provide a slightly different service, you need to “have a conversation” set up a contract, pricing is generally not transparent, and you can’t just have customers send them samples without another detailed conversation…

It’s seems a little bit like the server hosting situation before AWS…

We need an AWS for sequencing. Here’s how I imagine it working…

First of all you create a “BioWS” account and select a service type. This creates your service account, with transparent pricing for the sample type you’ve selected. As a service provider you can then create new samples either via the API (integrated into your own platform) or via the web interface:

With a new sample created, you (the service provider) will be billed and a sample collection kit will be sent out to your customer. You can then track this via the BioWS API and obtain sequence data when it’s available.

Technically, this doesn’t seem particularly challenging, and that it could be a platform that removes significant barriers to entry and enables a bunch of new applications.

In fact, the main reason I’m even thinking about it… is because I want to use it.

So… does anyone want to build the AWS of Sequencing?

1. There are perhaps a number of reasons for this, but one is that Bioinformatics has largely been built around open source academic tools and commercial tools have so far failed to provide enough of a value add.