It was with great reluctance that the Sage Science team boarded planes taking us back to snowy Boston after a sunny and productive AGBT meeting in Florida.
One of the key messages of this year’s Marco Island conference was that the actual sequencing technology is no longer the main focus for needed improvement. Sure, established sequencing vendors will continue to tweak their platforms, and upstarts eager to join the space will continue to innovate with new ways to read off those As, Cs, Gs, and Ts. But speaker after speaker noted that with sequencing itself working so well, the doors are now open for real advances in sample preparation — especially for ways to make it more robust, reproducible, and cost-effective.
Here at Sage, we have long been motivated by that challenge. We believe that automated sample prep solutions will trump manual steps, which introduce run-to-run variability, allow for cross-contamination, and increase cost. Our Pippin products have already been proven by independent studies to be more reliable than manual gel extraction for DNA sizing, and we look forward to seeing our new SageELF whole-sample fractionation system gain traction as well.
We are grateful to so many people for a terrific AGBT. Thanks to the conference organizers and scientific committee for pulling together top-notch talks and thought-provoking posters. We appreciate all of the attendees who took time to stop by our suite and learn more about our new SageELF or see the prototype for our high-throughput Pippin instrument. And we thank the sponsoring companies who hosted great social events that kept us up and networking into the wee hours. Now it’s time to put our dancing shoes away and get back to building better sample prep solutions!