Cepheids and Sequencing
First and foremost, belated apologies for not providing regular updates to the Substack over the past few weeks. Life got increasingly busy with some fascinating conversations in relation to Reticula among other things. The sequencing world has been pretty busy too, with Genapsys filing for bankruptcy and Illumina being ordered to pay MGI $325M.
But rather than talking about any of that, today I’m going to write about Cepheid, a qPCR diagnostic company. I’m not inherently interested in qPCR, but it feels like Cepheid might indicate the direction we need to go in with sequencing to gain wider adoption, particularly in diagnostics.
Cepheid (or should that be Cepheids?) make molecular diagnostic (qPCR) machines, and have been around for 26 years. Their install base is 40000 instruments (about twice as many as Illumina). Annual revenue is ~$2B, with ~36 million tests shipped a year (compared to ~$3B for Illumina).
Critically, Cepheid has nothing like the market share Illumina has. They like have <10% of the molecular diagnostics market. But they do have a very simple sample-to-answer qPCR platform, which can be deployed in hospitals and clinics.