Life Technologies hosted more than 200 customers in San Diego the first week of December for a meeting we called “Sequencing at the Tipping Point”. The hypothesis we had posed was sequencing technology and utility was at a tipping point of moving from discovery into wide scale clinical utility over the coming years.

The debate was well set prior to my talk on the first day with a group from the Nijmegen Centre for Molecular Life Sciences in the Netherlands sharing information on childhood diseases they have been solving with our SOLiD Next Generation sequencing technology, contrasting a talk by the COO from Myriad Genetics, who use all our CE based sequencing technology on “The Perspiration of Translation,” discussing the cost and time needed to translated discoveries from the academic lab into the clinic.

In my talk, I outlined the technical progress that was being made on the way to the $1000 genome and our vision of what it would take to have all cancer patients having their genome sequenced and described the work ongoing at TGEN in a first clinical trial of triple negative breast cancer patients.

Congratulations to the team who organized this meeting, and thanks to all of our customers who attended and participated.