Helicos plans to sell five (or ten) instruments before year end

[ECO]

GenomeWeb has a brief article about an announcement from Helicos regarding their instrument sales for the rest of the year.

Their CEO told investors at a UBS conference that they plan to sell 5-10 Heliscopes before the end of the year, and 25-30 in 2009.

One line that caught my eye that has to be a typo...

Lombardi said that the total cost of ownership, when taking into account extra costs such as sample prep and reagents, is roughly $1.35 million versus $1.16 million from the competing product.

What competitor instrument costs even close to $1 million? And there is only one competitor?

And finally...there is a potential gem hidden in that article....

Asked how the HeliScope will compete against the newest version of ABI’s SOLiD sequencer, which ABI plans to launch next week, Lombardi said the HeliScope’s “combination of benefits will make us a winner in the marketplace.”

Seems like things might get more interesting on the SOLiD front next week...!

[Chipper]

Hi,

it was not a typo, more like what would it cost to get similar capacity from competitors. There are a few gems in the UBS conferendce webcast (http://www.ibb.ubs.com/Conferences/co_highlights.shtml), Helicos specifications are >= 8 M "usable reads" / lane (> 25 bp) and SOLiD 3.0 was mentioned in the Invitrogen talk. Don't know what it is about but would guess updated software and 50 bp reads.

Helicos specifications are up on the homepage also.