KH Innovation

Biotechnology market insights and consulting services

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Single Cell Biology – upcoming conference at the Sanger Institute

The Single Cell Biology conference at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is less than one month away. This promises to get very interesting, with these scientific sessions and an excellent line-up of speakers:

  • Cellular decision-making at single cell resolution
  • Advancing biology through single cell imaging
  • Single cell genomics
  • Single cell approaches in immunology
  • Tissue and tumour heterogeneity
  • Disruptive technologies
  • Computational approaches: bioinformatics and modelling

SCB_banner_Sanger 2016 conference

Contact me or leave a comment if you are also going.

Single cell analysis is an exciting new market that is continuing to grow at an impressive pace. More and more established life science suppliers are waking up to the opportunity. For example, BD acquired Cellular Research and launched the FACSseq cell sorter for single cell genomics last year. Illumina and Bio-Rad have recently announced a partnership for co-development, combining Bio-Rad’s droplet partitioning technology with Illumina’s NGS.

Single cell pioneers Fludigm have had a rough streak recently and lost 87% of their stock value since April 2015, arguably from a wildly over-inflated valuation. Their strategy of creating a complete suite of tools for single cell genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics still looks sound though (more in a future Business Analysis here in the KH Innovation blog). Life sciences behemoth ThermoFisher are suspiciously absent from this market so far, but single cell analysis is firmly on their radar, according to sources in the industry. Should there be another big acquisition on the horizon?

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Portable, automated sample preparation for nanopore DNA sequencing on the MinION

Nanopore sequencing and microfluidics are among the technologies set to disrupt the Life Sciences industry. What Is your business doing today to remain relevant tomorrow?

Recently at the Festival of Genomics in London I was fortunate to get my hands on the latest breakthrough-in-the-making by Oxford Nanopore. They presented a prototype DNA sample preparation device for MinION sequencing dubbed “VolTRAX”:

Voltrax_Klaus Hentrich_KH Innovation

Oxford Nanopore VolTRAX prototype on MinION, January 2016. © Klaus Hentrich.

It is programmable, about the size of a credit card and docks directly on the MinION from which it also receives its power. VolTRAX is a disposable device supposed to handle “original biological samples”; from talking to one of their technical specialists, more details are unavailable at this point, as product specifications are yet to be nailed down.

VolTRAX works by electrowetting, or “digital microfluidics”– the basic principle is the same as Illumina’s NeoPrep, while the latter weighs some 20 kg and is clearly not designed for in-field use.

VolTRAX launch is planned for this year (a more specific window has not yet been announced). While important questions such as supported sample types and sample volumes are still open, this is an exciting product launch to look forward to. Similar to what Fluidigm did with their C1, we can expect Votrax to be launched initially with one or two key applications (such as pathogen sequencing from whole blood) and further capabilities added later on.

Together with Oxford Nanopore’s real-time cloud-based sequence analysis, the MinION-VolTRAX combination will for the first time enable mobile DNA sequencing anywhere, as long as there is a decent internet connection; and future iterations of their software may even remove this restriction.

This will fundamentally change our idea of a molecular biology “laboratory”, and will open up countless possibilities. What do you think will be the “killer application”?