Year In Review - Everything Else!

Dec 20, 2024

In the last couple of posts I’ve been reviewing this years substack posts. This is the last of these “review” posts and we will soon return to our regularly scheduled programing.

But first of all, thanks to all my subscribers in 2024! I’ve hugely enjoyed writing this year and look forward to continuing in 2025!

There’s no strong theme here, but we can pick out a few common threads:

Clinical Sequencing

I’ve written a fair bit about the rise of clinical sequencing applications, in particular how this is now >50% of Illumina’s revenue. But, while NGS was born out of whole genome sequencing, this doesn’t seem to be where the majority of clinical revenue is. With this largest chunks being NIPT (25%), Genetic Disease Testing (25%, likely mostly targeted and including WGS), and 50% oncology. We also dug into that Oncology piece, and decided that most of this was targeted too.

I suspect we will continue to see an increase in clinical applications of sequencing. But this and personal experience led me to conclude that clinicians often have a hard time with testing in general and NGS in particular. And view the potential size of some clinical sequencing markets, such as sequencing new borns in the NICU, with some skepticism.

Protein Sequencing

I’m always interested in new protein sequencing approaches. And this year pondered on the difficulty (or ease) of Nanopore based approaches. In particular what makes it hard, and what might make it easier, and looking at one of the companies working on this.

There of course was a lot of news out of QuantumSi, including a massive shift in technological approach, and further redundancies.

There still seems to be a lot of potential in protein sequencing, and I suspect we’ll see some interesting progress here in 2025.

Single Cell

I finished up last year with a post that sparked a lot of interest suggest that 10X instruments has a BOM cost of $5000. I continued this by fully documenting the pneumatic system of the instrument. That work takes a lot of time, and I’m not always sure if reader find it sufficiently interesting (hit, subscribe if you do!). But it helps build out my understanding of these platforms, and drives a lot of the other posts.

I in January spent some time pondering 10X, and being somewhat skeptical that they could show continued growth. Looking again in October 10Xs revenue seemed to be pretty flat, they appear to have some nice products but it’s not clear to me how big the demand is.

In terms of patents, they had some bad news with various patents being invalidated. But seem to have killed Nanostring, for various definitions of death.

Outside of 10X and Nanostring we discussed a lot of other single cell companies and developed an ontology of approaches. None of these yet seem to be a serious challenger to 10X, but there’s a complete of the ones I’ve talked about below!

Other Sequencing Companies

This year I really enjoyed looking at Ultima in particular. There are a lot of weird and interesting aspects to their technology. A surface packing approach that doesn’t use patterning. A very different approach to reducing the number of empty/polycolony bead and therefore increasing throughput. And of course I particularly enjoyed the lack of technical information on PPMSeq, which had me hunting through patents and speculating about how it works (I think I was mostly right?).

Elsewhere we’ve talked about nanotrains and magnetic motion control, and poked around in TSMCs sequencing IP, and looked at Armonica who are still working on their long read single molecule platform. And looked back at the sequencing adjacent NabSys…

Other Companies And Weird Experiments

We took a quick look at Pleno, and some other weirder things on the diagnostic side like Steradian Technologies, SMi Drug Discovery Limited, Chronus Health, and CoDx, and well as several spatial companies: Curio Biosciences, Singular Genomics - Spatial.

Some of which prompted my own weird experiments with multispectral sensors and qPCR machines.

Fin

Those are the highlights, but you can find the rest of my posts listed below. I hope to find time to put out a few more posts before the new year.

It’s been wonderful to see continued interest in what are often weird niche topics this year. It’s great to know that there are other folks as interested in this stuff as much as I am!

Hope you all have a great 2025! Keep it weird!