
Flatley's Law: The Company Speeding A Genetic Revolution - NnamdiJr
http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2014/08/20/flatleys-law-how-one-company-became-the-force-behind-medicines-genetic-revolution/
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adventured
Every time I see articles like this, it reminds me how much the FDA's poor
treatment of the genetic testing market infuriates me. What the FDA has done
to 23andMe is disgusting (an Illumina customer).

Why can't I spend $99 and find out if I have a prominent heart disease marker,
that killed both my father and grandfather by 55? Because the healthcare
market is regulated by the government for the benefit of various cartels. They
want me to spend thousands of dollars and be forced to go through layers of
doctors to get the same results instead.

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melling
I guess you missed where people were getting different "interpretations" from
different companies.

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pkaye
People also get different "interpretations" from different doctors.

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femto
I'd make two observations:

1) Illumina/Solexa's breakthrough was to convert sequencing into a problem
limited by computing resources (reassembling the jigsaw), so they were able to
leverage improvements in semiconductor processing.

2) This quote grabbed me:

"But Flatley is confident that Illumina’s footprint, which includes not just
machines but also the software to handle genomic data, will make the company
hard to unseat."

A call to arms for the Free Software movement?

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daughart
As for your first point, shotgun sequencing was not invented by Illumina.
Shotgun sequencing, or sequencing many small fragments and then
computationally reconstructing a larger contig, was first done in 1979, and
later used by many groups (most famously by Celera Genomics in their quest to
beat the human genome project). Shotgun sequencing can be done using any short
sequencing reads, so this is neither a breakthrough nor even an advantage for
Illumina.

Illumina's chemistry was better than the others, and they marketed their
advantages better. The Illumina machine produced longer reads than SOLiD (Life
Technologies), and produced more reads than 454 (Roche). They produced
reliable instruments that were relatively easier to use than the others also,
which made them favorites for core facilities.

