PacBio Acquires Apton!

PacBio has announced that they are going to acquire Apton BioSystems for approximately $110M. Some of this is dependent on the Apton technology successfully being integrated into the PacBio’s SBS platform.

The market for sequencing companies currently doesn’t seem great. With Singular (a company with viable sequencing platform) holding a market cap of less than $56M.

This makes the Apton acquisition look like a solid exit, which should give the Apton team the resources they need to develop their approach!

So, why did PacBio acquire Apton?

I previously looked at PacBio’s Onso trying to figure out if that platform used patterned flowcells or not. Looking through the patent portfolio, there wasn’t much to go on. The single patent I found described a nanosphere lithography process. This didn’t seem like a great option for a commercial platform.

To build a competitive high throughput instrument PacBio will need a viable patterning approach. Ideally one which will let them push densities to Illumina levels of <300nm between sequencing sites.

Without this, it’s unlikely you can build a NovaSeq X class sequencing instrument. Competitors going for the “mid-range/NextSeq” market don’t seem to be doing too well. A high throughput instrument might be what’s needed to entice users away from Illumina (see after the break below).

PacBio claim that Apton’s tech will help them create a high throughput sequencer (like Illumina’s NovaSeq X).

The Technology

I wrote about Apton back in 2020 (consider subscribing to get a heads up on companies like Apton!). It was clear then that Apton were looking at some kind of super-resolution approach.

PacBio’s investor deck revealed a little more about the approach and how it works:

From this, it looks like Apton have a technology which allows then to pack clusters on a surface at super-resolution densities. This doesn’t look like a traditional patterned flowcell. But it does seem to show clusters which are packed at a density in the 200 to 400nm range.

This is likely at least as good as the density used on the NovaSeq X.

Unlike Element and Singular’s current systems, PacBio will therefore be in a position to take aim at the high throughput short read sequencing market!

Like many others, Pacbio seem to believe this is the bulk of the market. But in any case, their slides suggest they they will have an instrument to target every segment:

PacBio’s New Instrument Lineup

Based on these slides, future Pacbio lineup seems to look like this:

• Onso: A NextSeq 2000 class mid-range short read sequencer

• “SuperOnso”: A NovaSeq X class high-throughput short read sequencer

• “RevioMini”: A Benchtop long read sequencer

• Revio: A (mid-range?) long read sequencer

• “SuperRevio”: Some kind of undisclosed high-throughput long-read sequencer

I’ve not seen mention of a “SuperRevio” type sequencer before… and I wonder how far into development this system is. PacBio’s chip based system is not trivially scalable, so I’m unclear what the approach here might be.

PacBio is clearly still investing in short read approaches. This suggests that the “SuperRevio” either has significant technical risk around it, or that it’s unlikely to remain significantly more expensive than short read SBS.

Will be fun to see how this plays out. As usual… a few more thoughts on this after the break.