Thoughts For Ex-PacBio Employees

My LinkedIn feed seems awash with folks announcing their departure from PacBio, which is only natural in the aftermath of recently announced layoffs.

Most of these seem to come from the closure of the old Omniome site in San Diego. I have only a passing association with Omniome having done a little bit of consulting very early on.

From what I understand Omniome had a pretty complicated and interesting history, I hope someone writes is down sometime. If they do I’d love to read it!

But, this feels like something of an end to that story. And mass layoffs like this suck however you look at them. I hope everyone makes their way through this as well as can be expected.

I don’t have any specific advice¹. But if there’s anything I can do feel free to reach out!

Omniome’s original CEO (Swamy) posted on the Discord that he’d be up for helping out with the assembly of a new sequencing company. While I’m sure a lot of folks will need a to find a new role as soon as possible, this might be an interesting option for some.

In fact, I suspect there are a lot of “roads not taken” that would be interesting to pursue based on both the Omniome and PacBio journeys.

So for the rest of this post, I thought it would be fun to throw some ideas around:

• Sample-to-answer, low cost sequencing instruments. Omniome has IP around low cost sample-to-answer sequencing. I still think a sample-to-answer platform would be pretty interesting. While Omniome has some IP here, I don’t think it would be difficult to find a way forward.

• What can be done with the expiring ZMW IP? Some which appears to be expiring this year?

  • Could you make a smaller chip with ~1000 wells? Can you use advances in optics/cameras to simply the rest of the system? What niche applications might this have?

  • Can targetting be built into the process? Build a simple targeted sequencing platform for applications where long reads are critical?

• Non-CCS systems

  • PacBio only provide CCS sequencing on the Revio. But the platform seems capable of generating much longer reads on linear templates. Are there interesting applications here?

  • Would this also potentially let you sequence multiple templates per-ZMW? Are there applications where this would be interesting?

• Direct RNA sequencing

  • Way back PacBio were looking at direct RNA sequencing, I don’t see any reason why it couldn’t work, but perhaps was don’t considered a compelling enough market. Maybe a niche can be found? Viral diagnostics is the obvious one to me, but perhaps there are others!

I’m sure there are many others… come discuss on the Discord! And best of luck!

1. I wish I had better career advice, at best I’d suggest you do the exact opposite of whatever I’d do. In the words of Douglas Adams:

“It's the story of my life. You see, the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead. Now, as you look through this document you'll see that I've underlined all the major decisions I ever made to make the stand out. They're all indexed and cross-referenced. See? All I can suggest is that if you take decisions that are exactly opposite to the sort of decisions that I've taken, then maybe you won't finish up at the end of your life" --she paused, and filled her lungs for a good should--"in a smelly old cave like this!”