On the topic of your post, why do you think that ONT has not taken off? On the face of it, low capital cost, super long reads, and claimed Q20+ accuracy sounds like it should be doing better than it is. What’s the catch in your opinion?
Because it has niche applications at the current price point and it isn’t clearly better than Illumina for many applications, but is somewhat more expensive.
I think prior valuations were based on ONT taking a much larger share of Illumina’s market, or opening up new markets. And I don’t think that’s happened.
Currently the long reads and other benefits mostly suit smaller research apps. And probably even those users do the bulk of their work on Illumina and then some stuff on ONT as additional validation or to help build a reference etc.
ONTs most popular instrument seems to be the MinION and for research, it’s probably a no brained to buy that and generate a few papers. But that doesn’t seem to drive significant revenue for the company (that I can tell from the accounts).
To really gain mass adoption it would need to be as cheap, as accurate, and as robust as Illumina I would imagine. That is unless some unique selling point/market around long reads, base modifications can be found (but those markets seems small right now).
PB seems like it might have a better shot at taking some of Illumina’s market. If they can produce long, highly accurate reads and near (say within x2) Illumina costs. Then if you can build a market for “clinical grade” whole genomes this could be interesting.
Interesting post, as always. Naive question: what does EGP stand for? I googled briefly but was swamped by all kinds of irrelevant hits..
Sorry, should have expanded that. EGP is "Emirati Genome Program".
Thanks.
On the topic of your post, why do you think that ONT has not taken off? On the face of it, low capital cost, super long reads, and claimed Q20+ accuracy sounds like it should be doing better than it is. What’s the catch in your opinion?
Because it has niche applications at the current price point and it isn’t clearly better than Illumina for many applications, but is somewhat more expensive.
I think prior valuations were based on ONT taking a much larger share of Illumina’s market, or opening up new markets. And I don’t think that’s happened.
Currently the long reads and other benefits mostly suit smaller research apps. And probably even those users do the bulk of their work on Illumina and then some stuff on ONT as additional validation or to help build a reference etc.
ONTs most popular instrument seems to be the MinION and for research, it’s probably a no brained to buy that and generate a few papers. But that doesn’t seem to drive significant revenue for the company (that I can tell from the accounts).
To really gain mass adoption it would need to be as cheap, as accurate, and as robust as Illumina I would imagine. That is unless some unique selling point/market around long reads, base modifications can be found (but those markets seems small right now).
PB seems like it might have a better shot at taking some of Illumina’s market. If they can produce long, highly accurate reads and near (say within x2) Illumina costs. Then if you can build a market for “clinical grade” whole genomes this could be interesting.
That seems like a harder sell for ONT.
Interesting, thanks!!