Ultima Genomics Absentminded IPO?

I have an wound infection…

I was cutting a tree, the saw slipped. A flash of pain… and now some kind of bacterial infection¹.

This probably doesn’t mean much for you, but it means I’m feeling sleep deprived, more cynical than usual and significantly more willing to stare absentmindedly at YouTube videos...

Specifically, this video of the Ultima CEO pitching the company for ARK Invest.

The most of the confusing statements² just washed over my soporific barely conscious mind. Perhaps this is the ideal state in which to listen to a pitch. I can more easily suspend disbelief and choose to live in a world where DNA sequencing is all about hyper-elastic demand. I can drift away into a fantastical dream land where doctors are begging me to let them sequence by genome… and would do lots more… if only it was a little bit cheaper.

It’s a nice distraction from the far harsher reality of shouting at a seemingly endless stream of doctors until they acknowledge that DNA sequencing exists and should be used in profound rare disease cases…

Ultima CEO Gilad, already lives in this beautiful fantastical land, and I envy him:

“but everyone gets sequenced every year or every time you go to the doctor right they check your cholesterol they check your white blood cells they take whatever there's no way they don't check your circulating DNA”

Yes… I should just allow myself to drift slowly into this fantasy too, head slump in exhaustion over my laptop. And forget the many times doctors told me profound intellectual disability requires no testing… let alone sequencing. Do they even know what sequencing is? The geneticist at the local university hospital had never heard of Pacific Biosciences…

Forget… forget that I’m at risk of bacterial infections due to taking an immune suppressant. But no-one would even consider routinely using a sequencing based test for Sepsis in my case.

No… drift away with me... Hyper-elastic $10 genomes bouncing happily in front of my eyes:

“in terms of the $10 genome I think it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when, and um both in terms of the ability to do it and in terms of uh having the hyper elastic demand that when the world is a $10 genome you know a lot more will be spent on sequencing than it is today.”

In a more prosaic reality somewhere the other side of sleep delirium Ultima appear to have fired a bunch of folks late last year. With a suggestion that they are preparing for an IPO, at least according to GlassDoor³:

So perhaps as my mind recovers and reassembles itself, I’ll return to my previous assessment of Ultima. Which is that they seem to be doing “ok” in terms of platform validation, but there thesis was formed at a time when money was much more easily available and it’s unclear that the funds or commercial volume that they need exist in the short term. No matter how aggressively they reduce pricing.

1. Against the Ultima thesis (and completely unsurprisingly) the doctor did not sequence my wound… or offer any diagnostic testing at all.

2. “everyone gets their genome sequence maybe even annual basis”

“much less reagents”

“different kind of camera system”

“there is a hyper elastic demand for more and more genomic information”

On homopolymers: “could have been harder to do with older cameras and not as stable lasers and less advanced image processing but these days it’s pretty straightforward to say that’s an 8 and that’s a 9”… I thought this was about minimizing dye-dye interactions using mostly natural bases…. hmmm….

3. Other reviews are fun too: