Year In Review: Sequencing

Dec 30, 2025

In my last post I listed the 200 posts I’ve written this year. That’s a little overwhelming for me. So I thought I’d break things down into a few themes.

Looking at sequencing there were three big events that stand out to me.

The first, was Roche’s announcement of a high throughput nanopore sequencing platform, quality and cost competitive with Illumina.

The second, Gordon stepping down as CEO of Oxford Nanopore.

And the third… well there isn’t really a third standout event for me. But Illumina continues to… change? decline? reposition? But remain the largest player in sequencing.

Roche

I was extremely bullish prior to the Roche webinar, and took some flack for this. A lot of the skepticism around Roche comes from their reputation as being a place where “NGS goes to die”, I wrote about their long history of failures in sequencing here.

The expansion sequencing approach they are using, has an even longer history, going back to the 1990s. And was considered unviable by many.

In short, nobody really expected Roche to come out with any kind of viable nanopore platform.

But the webinar abstract was already exciting, reading this, generally chatter and some of the patents… it seemed like something very exciting was to appear.

My notes (posted during the webinar) surpassed my expectations. While they confirmed that baseline quality is probably (a little) lower than Illumina, reads were longer and throughput was in the NovaSeq range. Very competitive with Illumina.

Further releases from Roche have shown a solid early access rollout, and incremental improvement.

In reaction to this, other players (specifically Illumina) have done very little. Competitors are largely downplaying the potential impact and waiting to see what appears.

Of course, Roche (as they have before) can fail here.

But at least to me, the data released suggests the future is in single molecule sequencing (you can find all the Roche posts linked below).

Oxford Nanopore

Gordon announced that he was leaving Oxford Nanopore. Spike also very quietly left the company. Given he legalistic threats to me and others in the sequencing community, I can’t say I was sad to see him go.

Here’s what I think about Oxford Nanopore… for various reasons Oxford became the focus of essentially all investment in the Nanopore field. They raised a lot and have deployed billions in the development of their platform.

That gave them a lead in nanopore sequencing, and allowed them to pivot their approach when promising data appeared from academia.

The executive team were very good at raising the capital required. But it’s less clear that they deployed these funds effectively. Billions of dollars spent, for a revenue in the low $100Ms. Running at a loss, with a challenging road to profitability.

Gordon didn’t seem like someone who was willing to make the tough decisions to hit profitability by 2027. While redundancies were announced, head count didn’t fall…

At the same time, we’re seeing a large number of Oxford-clones appearing in China (Qitan, PolySeq, and BGI being the most significant). While these may not make a short term impact, they show that others can bring up a nanopore platform fairly quickly.

And of course there’s Roche. Oxford have largely dismissed this threat… but it doesn’t work in their favor.

In short, Oxford’s new CEO has their work cut out for them. And given their background, it seems not unlikely that they are tasked with engineering an acquisition as one possible exit for the company.

Illumina

I don’t have a huge amount to say about Illumina. Like Oxford they’ve been facing competition from instruments using very similar approaches (Element, Ultima, BGI etc.). But also general stagnation of their market. The most interesting thing about Illumina for me, is their continued shift toward clinical applications (>60% of revenue now?) where everyone else is largely research dominated.

But their revenue is flat.

I suspect we will see a return to low level growth. But the general lack of volume growth and competition (including Roche) will continue to take its toll.

PacBio

Ahhh… so sad. PacBio a company generating the highest quality sequencing data available (in my opinion) continues to just exist.

This despite some very strong products (like the Vega) which unfortunately have seen limited adoption. Sadly some great people were let go.

The hope is that reuse will give them a boost next year. But the unfortunate reality might be that the market for long reads is currently just too small…