Sorry about your injury Nava, hope it gets better soon!
Agreed about the immense interia in medicine; in fact most fields. Which is a pity because there really seems to be a goldmine of data in the blood and the more sequencing that happens, the more likely it is that we can access it; a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation.
If you're not convinced by Ultima's 10$ hypothetical offering (especially since they'll need samples to be shipped to a central facility), what technological leap do you think will truly bring sequencing into GP clinics, or at least ICU/emergency departments?
On this note, what do you think about the Cepheid-ONT partnership? Keith has a good post about this.
Perhaps it's my infection induced cynicism but perhaps it's just a hard problem and there is no easy short term solution?
If the world was rational, even to a first approximation I suspect many of the global challenges we are facing would be non-issues. But that unfortunately doesn't mean I see an easily path to resolving them.
Similarly, the benefit of large scale long read sequencing for all rare disease patients seems obvious. Particularly via well funded national programs. But I'm not sure how you get buy in from clinicians?
This may just be a long process of waiting for a new cohort of better educated clinicians, and waiting for better therapeutic options (so that sequencing has a better chance of changing patient outcomes).
You'd try and push it to the point where those programs are getting overwhelmed with demand. That would hopefully make the desire to sequencing more obvious and put more pressure on pricing? Currently I suspect many patients don't even know about their existence...
Outside of whole genome sequencing. I'm less clear. The MRD market seems relatively small and somewhat well served by current platforms. What are the other large scale applications, e.g. the one's Gilad suggests will result in sequencing every time you visit the doctor. Early stage cancer detection might be one... so perhaps we just need to wait until (if) that has a sufficiently low false positive rate? (or for whatever reason is sufficiently compelling).
Like Gilad, I do suspect these large scale applications will appear at some point. But a little skeptical that this is on a sufficiently short timeline to enable the Ultima Genomics thesis (i.e. we might be talking about 5yr+ and Ultima might not have enough cash). And it's also not clear that if this plays out Illumina (like MGI) or Roche won't have or can't come out with something just as compelling as Ultima giving them they little edge and leaving many fighting in a race to the bottom.
Sorry about your injury Nava, hope it gets better soon!
Agreed about the immense interia in medicine; in fact most fields. Which is a pity because there really seems to be a goldmine of data in the blood and the more sequencing that happens, the more likely it is that we can access it; a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation.
If you're not convinced by Ultima's 10$ hypothetical offering (especially since they'll need samples to be shipped to a central facility), what technological leap do you think will truly bring sequencing into GP clinics, or at least ICU/emergency departments?
On this note, what do you think about the Cepheid-ONT partnership? Keith has a good post about this.
Perhaps it's my infection induced cynicism but perhaps it's just a hard problem and there is no easy short term solution?
If the world was rational, even to a first approximation I suspect many of the global challenges we are facing would be non-issues. But that unfortunately doesn't mean I see an easily path to resolving them.
Similarly, the benefit of large scale long read sequencing for all rare disease patients seems obvious. Particularly via well funded national programs. But I'm not sure how you get buy in from clinicians?
This may just be a long process of waiting for a new cohort of better educated clinicians, and waiting for better therapeutic options (so that sequencing has a better chance of changing patient outcomes).
Personally if I were working on this, I'd try and drive more rare disease patients toward existing national programs: https://aseq.substack.com/p/clinicians-hate-ngs
You'd try and push it to the point where those programs are getting overwhelmed with demand. That would hopefully make the desire to sequencing more obvious and put more pressure on pricing? Currently I suspect many patients don't even know about their existence...
Outside of whole genome sequencing. I'm less clear. The MRD market seems relatively small and somewhat well served by current platforms. What are the other large scale applications, e.g. the one's Gilad suggests will result in sequencing every time you visit the doctor. Early stage cancer detection might be one... so perhaps we just need to wait until (if) that has a sufficiently low false positive rate? (or for whatever reason is sufficiently compelling).
Like Gilad, I do suspect these large scale applications will appear at some point. But a little skeptical that this is on a sufficiently short timeline to enable the Ultima Genomics thesis (i.e. we might be talking about 5yr+ and Ultima might not have enough cash). And it's also not clear that if this plays out Illumina (like MGI) or Roche won't have or can't come out with something just as compelling as Ultima giving them they little edge and leaving many fighting in a race to the bottom.