If ASHG attendees can count on one thing, it’s PacBio creating a buzz (and throwing a great party). The company has developed a reputation for launching its products with flair, typically accompanied by a concert with a band that is not too old (but not too new, either) like Maroon 5 and Flo Rida. This year was no exception. When PacBio launched their latest instrument, Vega, on Wednesday night, One Republic was on site to help them do it.
Vega is a true benchtop (measuring 2 feet by 2 feet) with a list price of $169,000 and a run time of 24 hours (the same as a Revio run). Vega’s one 25M SMRT cell offers a throughput of 600 full-length RNA samples per year or 200 human genomes. The company is now accepting orders for Vega systems, which it plans to begin shipping in the first quarter of 2025.
Rolling the Vega out now is part of PacBio’s larger strategy to build a portfolio of sequencers, both long and short read. Why? Because PacBio needs to “meet customers where they are.” Revio was introduced to break the $1000 genome, for the people who want high throughput sequencing. But Revio is big, high throughput, and costly. Many people cannot afford it and don’t do enough sequencing to make it count.
Henry told GEN that they want to make HiFi technology more accessible. “Because if we can do that,” said Henry, “these customers will get hooked on HiFi. Over time their projects will scale and they’ll scale into Revio, and then maybe over time they’ll scale into what comes after Revio.”
Creating a SPRQ
The Vega launch comes on the heels of an announcement made last week of a new chemistry (called SPRQ) for the Revio. Henry said that the new chemistry “does two or three fundamental things that give researchers new capability and give us a great opportunity to grow.” Perhaps the most important advance, he said, is that it reduces DNA input down from 2 μg to 500 ng, allowing access to samples that couldn’t be used before, such as blood spots and saliva. More sample types mean a broader market for PacBio.
Engaging the community
A benchtop machine is not unique; there are now multiple options available to users. Notably, just a few weeks ago, Illumina launched a new version of its decade-old benchtop standby, the MiSeq. And there are thousands of customers already doing sequencing on benchtop sequencers.
PacBio hopes to reach those customers based on HiFi’s advantages and also because they are “catching up to [short reads] on the economic front.” The reason to launch the Vega right now is to “engage the entire genomics community” and to “enable people to adopt the power of long read sequencing.” Then, when people are hooked on their smaller VEGAs, they can grow into a Revio (and whatever other platforms Henry has up his sleeve).
PacBio has seen ups and downs this year (the downs coming from the stock market). Given that, can Henry justify a big party, with a rock band, at the conference? “Oh my God. Yeah!,” he answered. “We are trying to stand out!”
The event works to galvanize groups of people, he explained. They launched the Revio with a Maroon 5 concert two years ago and sold 76 units in eight weeks. Did Adam Levine’s tattoos have an effect? Maybe. Henry asserts that there is “a direct correlation between the scale of the event and the sales.”
Because PacBio is “the small kid on the block”, they have to be leaders of the community, Henry noted. The band is fun and cool, but it will also bring 1500 people in the same space at the same time, all ready to engage with PacBio, and learn about Vega. It’s priceless, noted Henry.
“We do not want to be just a life science company,” he added. “They are boring. We want to be changing the world and enabling the power of genomics to improve human health. That’s bigger than just a life science company at a genetics company. That’s our dream.”
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