Two closely watched genetic sequencing technology firms who had been unhappily affiliated have now divorced. UK-based Oxford Nanopore announced on 15 November that it has raised £56.4 million – mostly by selling the 13.5% of its shares that had been owned by San Diego-based Illumina since 2009. Read more
When 23andMe offered a few select clients the opportunity to have the protein-encoding portion of their genome sequenced, Gabe Rudy jumped at the chance. On Wednesday, he walked strangers through the results. His conclusion: most detected genetic “variants of interest” are either not variants or not interesting. “Clinics beware,” he writes in a blog post detailing the analysis. Read more
Roche has backed off of its hostile takeover bid for Illumina. The move came after Illumina shareholders rebuffed Roche’s efforts to install board members favorable to a merger at the San Diego-based gene sequencing technology company’s 18 April annual meeting. Read more
Scientists are irked over a paper claiming, as The New York Times reported on Monday, that “DNA’s power to predict illness is limited.” Yes, geneticists have replied; what else is new? Read more
Should patients undergoing genome sequencing be screened for a minimum set of disease-causing mutations, and should adults and children receive different types of genetic results? Read more
The board of directors of San Diego-based Illumina today rejected a takeover bid launched by Basel, Switzerland-based Roche. The move by Illumina, which estimates that its machines produce 90 percent of the world’s genetic sequencing output, was not surprising, given the company’s earlier moves to deter the offer. Read more
The race to the $1000 genome heated up today as Life Technologies announced that it will debut a new sequencing machine this year that will eventually be capable of decoding entire human genomes in a day for less than $1000. The machine, called the Ion Proton, will be the successor to Ion Torrent’s current offering, the Personal Genome Machine (Life Technologies is the parent company of Ion Torrent). Read more
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