By Bio-IT World Staff
February 23, 2010 | Pacific Biosciences has announced its first ten early access customers for its next-generation DNA sequencing system – a real-time detection method at the single-molecule level.
The first ten early-access customers for PacBio’s SMRT (single molecule real time) system, all from North America, are:
• Baylor College of Medicine
• Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
• Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
• U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute
• The Genome Center at Washington University
• Monsanto Company
• National Cancer Institute/SAIC-Frederick
• National Center for Genome Resources
• Ontario Institute for Cancer Research
• Stanford University
The first shipments to these organizations will commence in the next few months, with early-access programs for customers in Europe and Asia due to follow later this year.
"We are very excited about this opportunity," Dick McCombie, professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, told Bio-IT World. "We were an early adopter of the Solexa technology and we have really seen it change the way we do a lot of biology in my lab as well as in other labs at CSHL. I think that the PacBio technology will likely be disruptive in that same way. It will help us with our work on cognitive disorders by allowing us even better resolution and ultimately increased speed in looking at the genomic changes associated with these disorders. We are already getting exciting results there and this will let us really ramp up those efforts."
McCombie added that the PacBio instrument should open up novel approaches to address some of those disease questions. "One reason that we are happy to be involved in the early phase is that it gets us a head start in the area of creative, new applications," he said.
Other early adopters also expressed pleasure in joining the first cadre of users. “We see this as a potentially valuable tool that can be applied to a wide range of studies because of its versatility,” said Michael Snyder, professor and chair of genetics and director, Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine. “We are excited to have the opportunity to be one of the first institutions to access this technology with the potential to revolutionize personalized medicine,” said John McPherson, director of cancer genomics, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. McPherson said he would explore the longer read lengths of the PacBio system for targeted human sequencing and viral sequencing.
PacBio chairman and CEO Hugh Martin said he was delighted with the breadth of organizations in the early access program, and that the program had sold out. “The wide array of applications that will be explored by our initial customers will benefit from the key advantages of the SMRT system: long reads, fast cycle times, flexibility, and single-molecule resolution. This is what defines third-generation DNA sequencing.”
PacBio will use the early access program to ensure it is prepared for commercial launch of its sequencing system in the second half of 2010. PacBio will formally unveil the SMRT system at the end of this week during a workshop at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conference in Marco Island, Florida, as well as presenting examples of applications including DNA sequencing, direct RNA sequencing, methylation, and protein translation.