Let's Buy Singular Genomics!

Singular doesn’t seem to be doing so well, so let’s buy it and release a MiSeq-class sequencer?

Over on the Discord we’ve been discussing Singular Genomics again. The share price has continued to fall and the market cap now stands at around $41M:

Given this low low price we’ve been putting an offer together. So far we have soft commitments for $82.22. That might go as high as $90 once I’ve finished cleaning behind the sofa… if the market cap continues to fall maybe we’re in with a chance!

The question is what would you do with it if you bought it?

To summarize the story so far, Singular has come out with a NextSeq class, midrange DNA Sequencer. The instrument isn’t much cheaper the market leading offerings from Illumina ($350K), though the consumables are cheaper. The data quality looks reasonable, but nothing special.

And they’ve only sold 11 instruments.

What would we do to “fix” Singular.

Competing against the NextSeq doesn’t seem to be working. Spending $350K on an instrument is probably a big ask if you’re not confident that the company will exist next year.

But Singular still has ~$220M in the bank. That should be enough to do something interesting. My proposal is to come out with a cheap MiSeq class instrument.

I’m pretty confident that the MiSeq itself has a pretty low BOM cost. But with further cost optimization I think you could sell a MiSeq class box using Singular technology for $5K to $10K.

Illumina clearly don’t care much about the MiSeq (not having updated it for 12 years). But still probably their most popular instrument, with an estimated ~10000 in the field.

So there seems to be a chance here to grow the low end of the market. Sell the boxes at a modest profit, at a price where users will be willing to “take a chance”. Grow confidence.

Make sure the box is built to require minimal field support. Ideally it should be small enough that it can just be shipped back. Make the fluidic system contained within the cartridge (like the iSeq).

This would get rid of outside sales and field support, reducing burn.

It’s a model that’s closer to qPCR machines than sequencers. More inline with the Open QPCR model, or as someone on the Discord pointed out agricultural test instruments.

I’m a fan of using these kinds of instruments for diagnostics. But I think initially you’d be driving adoption in research applications. All those small labs who would like to have a sequencer to play with, perhaps to perform small experiments before sending libraries out to an external service.

You might even be able to make this instrument 100% with Illumina libraries. This would likely be seen as pretty high risk, but perhaps if we consider adapter sequences as essentially the sequencers ABI we might be able to find a legal route forward here?

If you were able to to gain solid traction in this market, this might be enough of a foothold to expand into NextSeq (and NovaSeq) class instruments at a later date.

Even so, I still think a cheap MiSeq-class device would be a pretty cool instrument.

In any case, I don’t have any better ideas... What about you? Hop over to the Discord and tell us what you’d do!