Cliff Reid Says New Supersequencer Leads the Pack for High Throughput Clinical Sequencing
Submitted by Ayanna Monteverdi on Fri, 10/16/2015 - 09:38Cliff Reid, CEO of Complete Genomics, is back on the conference circuit, touting a new product. After years of building his company to do sequencing as a service, Cliff presented data at last week's ASHG meeting on Complete's first sequencer as a product, or what they are calling the Revolocity supersequencer.
Cliff was a pioneer in developing the service model, offering only whole human genome sequencing. But after being bought out by BGI, who already had a service business in China, he was compelled to shift his business model to that of selling sequencers.
So where does this position Complete in an already crowded and mature sequencing tools market? And how does Cliff see the future of clinical sequencing? Cliff says that the new Revolocity offers the highest quality of any of the other sequencers. This is an impressive claim in a world where PacBio customers are saying they can get up to 100% accuracy with deep enough sequencing. As for throughput, the new supersequencer is similar to Illumina’s HiSeq X Ten system, producing about 10,000 whole human genomes per year.
However, Cliff says that high quality and high throughput are not the important part of the story here. “That's historically what people expected from us,” he says in today’s interview. "The most important thing we did with the Revolocity system is that we packaged it for clinical researchers and clinical use. The packaging is end-to-end.”
Strangely, in an age when longer sequencing reads have enabled genomic research to go to further heights, such as with HLA typing, the new Revolocity does not incorporate Complete’s LFR or Long Fragment Read technology. Long read sequencing is still a highly specialized effort, Cliff argues. Rather, he says, “we haven’t used the technology that we have today [short read technology]. What we need to do is sequence a million genomes."