Many thanks to the ASHG attendees who visited us at the Sage Science booth or stopped by our poster! ASHG 2015 was terrific, and the Sage team had a blast reconnecting with scientists and customers.
Naturally, in a meeting of 8,000 people, there was no single theme covering everything. But clinical genomics had a large role, and will be a nice fit for the technology we’re developing (we described it in our poster — check it out here). We believe that the ability to isolate extremely long DNA fragments will be increasingly important as sequencing technologies shift to single-molecule approaches delivering very long reads. That instinct was reinforced by the enthusiasm we saw among scientists at PacBio’s launch party for its new Sequel sequencer.
Sample prep didn’t get a lot of attention at ASHG this year — perhaps a sign that this part of the sequencing equation is more robust and routine than it has been in the past. If so, that’s good news for the sequencing community, and we’re glad to have played a part in helping scientists achieve it. Many companies like ours are bringing automation to various parts of the sequencing workflow, and collectively we are helping to make this process as bullet-proof as possible for maximum effectiveness in the clinic.
Our next conference presence will be the Festival of Genomics in San Mateo. If we didn’t catch up with you in Baltimore, we hope to see you in California next month!