The Institute That Never Was...

In early January 2010 Illumina made a big announcment – BGI was to purchase 128 of Illumina's brand new HiSeq 2000 sequencers. (In Sequence 1/12/10). Not to be outdone, Life Technologies followed up with their own announcement a couple of weeks later – the 'not quite yet formed' Ignite Institute was to purchase 100 of Life's brand new SOLiD 4 sequencers. (Genome Web 1/28/10) 

Inside Illumina there was a lot of skepticism (myself included) about Life's announcement. It just seemed like a desperate ploy to detract attention from the BGI announcement. In the back of my mind, however, I wondered if I was being too pessimistic in my Kool-Aid drinking. Turns out the answer was 'not so much'.

Ignite ran into a number of troubles with funding and the purchases never happened. In fact, Ignite never 'happened'. Instead it sort of merged with the Fox Chase Cancer during the formation of the 'Cancer Genome Institute at Fox Chase'. Perhaps most telling was that when Fox Chase forged their own partnership with Life the 'Ignite' name wasn't mentioned. As quoted in Kevin Davies article:

“We didn’t mention Ignite [when that was announced] – that was intentional,” Boyd explains. “We got tired of negative reporters who want to dig into what happened to Ignite [in Northern Virginia] and dredge up that experience.”

Negative experience, indeed!

As for BGI, they certainly still exist and they've actually purchased all 128 HiSeq 2000's (plus a few more). And they continue to draw strong reactions - praise, scorn and fear, to name a few.

(Lest anyone think I'm unfairly picking on Life, Illumina has been known to make a stumble or two. I'm looking at you, Avantome ;-)

A New Sequencing Player?

My interest was piqued when I saw the headline "PerkinElmer Steps into DNA Sequencing Market" from Genetic Engineering News. Was another major player entering the crowded market of next gen sequencing? (Reading, reading...). Hmm, no, it looks like they're offering services (reading some more). Ah, here it is, their business model:

"PerkinElmer’s model follows Complete Genomics, Illumina, and BGI (formerly known as Beijing Genomics Institute), wherein companies provide sequencing as a service rather than developing and launching competing sequencing platforms that scientists must buy to conduct sequencing projects on their own."

What? GEN is somehow equating the PE business model to ALL of the following:
Complete Genomics - "services only" using their own proprietary platform
Illumina - dominant next gen sequencing platform provider which happens of offer services as a small part of their business
BGI - standard, albeit stupendously large, service provider which primarily uses Illumina's platform

So, which one is it? Well, it's nothing more than yet another sequencing service provider using Illumina's HiSeq2000 instruments, which makes them pretty much like any of the dozen or so services providers listed here (and these are just the certified providers). So, they're sort of like BGI. Except to the best of my knowledge they haven't purchased 128 HiSeq instruments and they haven't stated that they'll sequence anything that's "tasty or cute".