454 Junior Sequencing kit

[zerocube]

Hi everyone
Recently Roche decided to terminate support for 454 junior and all the family of 454 pyrosequencer. I work in a large italian hospital and I use junior to sequence HIV's RT, protease and integrase gene for assenssing HAART.
Does anyone knows if there are in the world any other qualified producer for 454 sequencing kit reactives?
Thanks in advance for any response!

[kmcarr]

Hi everyone
Recently Roche decided to terminate support for 454 junior and all the family of 454 pyrosequencer.

They first announced this in October 2013.

Manufacturing of 454 sequencers will continue through 2015, and the sequencers will continue to be serviced through mid-2016...

I'd hardly call that recent; on the time scale of Next Generation Sequencing that's a generation ago.

I'm sure there is a lot of patent protected intellectual property that goes into the 454 reagents and Roche is unlikely to license it to a third party. More to the point it seems bit risky to continue to use an officially unsupported platform for diagnostic testing.

[pmiguel]

454/Roche Applied Sciences, had evidently lobotomized itself prior to their decision to market a desktop solution, rather than continue slugging it out on the big platform side with Illumina about, what, 5 years ago?

You should be able to pick up an Ion Torrent (PGM or something of that ilk) at a very low cost. Wouldn't that be the way to go?
--
Phillip

[zerocube]

kmcarr your post will not help. I don't care about how and when Roche decided to rule out 454, I only need kits. I hope you don't sequence like you reply to post because you completely failed the target.

pmiguel I agree with you about Roche's lobotomy, i'm afraid that i'll be forced to fall back to Ion torrent

[ECO]

This is a bummer...just tweeted a link to this thread to try to help.

[DNA_Dan]

How big are your targets? We cover small HIV regions on a MiSeq 600 cycle kit and can multiplex up to 384 samples in a single run using the Nextera XT adapters.