Everything Wrong With: "Illumina: The Measurement Monopoly" Part 5/8
Century of Biology still has ~10x the subscriptions I do… so I’m continuing my critical review of Elliot’s article on sequencing. Next we’re looking at this statement:
“these companies competed to drive down costs from the $300M price tag at the end of the Human Genome Project to as low as $1,000. Three of the main challengers were Pacific Biosciences, 454 Life Sciences, and Solexa Inc.”
We’re talking about 2005ish here, prior to Illumina’s acquisition of Solexa. PacBio wasn’t really a “main challenger” at this point they were only founded in 2004.
If you’re going to include PacBio you should probably include a host of other sequencing startups that were around is 2005 including Reveo, SeiRad, DNA Electronics, Intelligent Biosystems, Complete Genomics, and Oxford Nanolabs1. None of which were very far along perhaps… but then I don’t think PacBio was at the time either.
Really it was between 454 and Solexa, they were the only platforms showing data. Helicos wouldn’t launch until 2009, and PacBio not until 2011.
Next time, it’s not Elliot that’s wrong but someone he quoted. So subscribe for that!
If you’re aware of any others please send them my way. It would be nice to document all these.
He doesn’t mention SOLiD? If 454 is to be considered a player then SOLiD must be too