What Would Make People Move From Illumina (Poll Results)
Let’s take a quick look at the poll from earlier this week!
In summary the poll suggests:
Many user are not cost sensitive at all (even many NovaSeq users).
A cheap long read instrument would likely gain significant market share.
People would buy a cheap ($5000) MiSeq.
We started with a couple of questions about a users highest throughput sequencer:
Predictably for most users (75%) their highest throughput sequencer is an Illumina instrument, and users skew toward the high end (NovaSeq-class systems).
What’s most surprising here is the relatively large percentage of new sequencers (Singular/Element/Onso), 13% seems shockingly high!
Are Users Cost Sensitive?
Next we tried to figure out how cost sensitive users are:
The general trend is that more users would switch if the instruments and runs get cheaper.
What’s fascinating is how sticky some of these users are! 24% of users won’t switch even if the sequencer is 50% cheaper. Even at 90% some users still say “no” to an alternative!
The reality seems to be that some users just aren’t cost sensitive at all. Illumina currently works for them, is cheap enough and they’re sticking with it.
I was also surprised to see that this is somewhat constant across all instrument classes. Even if a instrument/runs are 50% cheaper 30% of users still won’t bother moving.
This suggest that new ultra-high throughput platforms might have a harder fight on their hands than expected.
Read Length
Users care about read length! Even a modest increase from 300bp to 1000bp at Illumina quality and cost levels would prompt a significant number of users (53%) to jump to a new platform.
However, there’s also a decent fraction of users who just don’t care, and wouldn’t move even for 100,000bp reads.
This probably gets even worse if the competing long read platform has even slightly higher cost or lower accuracy. And would explain the relatively low adoption we’re seeing for long read platforms.
However, poll numbers are nearly identical for a 90% cheaper instrument/run platform and one that is only 50% cheaper that provides 100000bp reads.
If you can produce a cheap long read instrument, you can likely gain significant market share.
Better Miseqs
80% of responders would buy a MiSeq that cost $5000. I’ve talk about this before, and I think this is a realistic proposition (given the Miseq BOM cost and engineering optimization).
A cheap Miseq with cheap runs fairs even better. A long read Miseq is also a compelling proposition! This suggests that there’s demand for a cheap sequencing instrument which isn’t already being served by the MinION.
By the numbers a $5000 MiSeq (keeping run costs the same) is just as compelling as any Illumina instrument with 50% cheaper runs and instruments.
Thanks for all who responded! The results were very interesting. Thoughts and suggestions welcome over on the Discord!