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Let's face it, most of the examples you make are rarely success', as far as clinical setting, it's the wildwest out there and no one is looking at this rodeo... lots of boxes still in boxes, little clinical worth and very little costs analysis on the health system. Don't get me wrong, I want sequencing... it's just basically not going to pick up as fast as you think. RT PCR is a great example, now, ACME inc make a low cost in China and OEMs that to anyone at 10K for an instrument that used to cost 100K. Any student can run one...No one would have done really well investing in QPCR.
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Pretty fun watching this discussion... keep it up fellas!
With regards to:
Since the subject is LT, they seem to be investing heavily in qPCR specifically in the digital PCR world. They've come it with something like 3-4 new models in 2-3 years. And if I look at what I do at my facility, it is primarily qPCR. It's cheap, it's fast, it's accurate, and "anyone" can do it (depending on many, many factors of course).Originally posted by Elcannibal View Post
NGS is icing on the cake right now and will replace sanger for clinical applications in the nearterm. Whole genome? Unlikely. Amplicon and targeted? Absolutely. Since I have a PGM, I want to jam everything on a $100 314 chip with a fusion primer approach. Libraries? No thanks. Fusion primers? Now that is cheap, fast, accurate, and "anyone" can do it.
All I need is a pliable oligo design system that will spit out an automatic solution for PCR, qPCR, Sanger, or NGS. Platform is really not that interesting in my book.
As for investing? Heck if I know. What I do know is I wouldn't take advice from a message board for that subject.
/my 2 centsComment
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Out of what hat do you pull these numbers? Lets set these things straight and do some oversimplified math on the actual numbers.Originally posted by Elcannibal View Post
1.: Life has paid 725 million for Ion Torrent.
2.: Illumina is worth 5800 million (according to Mr. Market and Roche).
If Life ends up eating Illuminas lunch that makes the acquisition of Ion Torrent a really good deal. But of course there is no guarantee for that. So what does the likelihood of that happening need to be for the deal to have positive expected value? Based on these numbers more than 12.5%.Comment
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Funny you speak of digital PCR... Digital PCR is pretty old, goes back to the days of Vogelstein for somatic mutation detection. It's also been shown to be rather... worthless. Go price a single digital pcr chip or array... Just not worth it. Digital PCR for Life is only a way to get leads, most users never touch digital since they could just get a simpler BioRad machine.
My real point is: If digital is so hot, then why does and machine for digital originally priced at 129,999.00 now barely sells at around 50,000.00. Getting back to the subject. This kind of revenue is just not going to make your stock grow...
Life gobling up Illumina... LOL, if Roche can't do it, I know Life can't even dream of it, plus the markets... No authority would have that.
Look, review this from all sides. If you know anything about Life, you know it has been sitting in a single digit growth market (that is said to be growing faster than a speeding bullet), and that growth mainly comes from cut backs...
Now, let's send a sequencer on Mars, ET needs one...
I'm not arguing here, sequencing is a great technology, the original post was about investment. Life and Illumina, will be duds on the long run because they will likely always need to fight off spin off attacks that come out with cheaper faster solution.
That vision you have, is the same that rolls over and over. Eric Schadt had big dreams at Pac Bio, Pac who ? Eric who ?Comment
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I know you are just trolling, but you raise an important point. Given what we have experienced with Helicos, PacBio and Oxford Nanopore why should we expect Ion Torrent to be any different?Originally posted by Elcannibal View Post
1.: Helicos, PacBio and Oxford Nanopore were all desperate for money and presented with two options:
A) Lie about their technology and sell a few machines / get more funding to survive for a little longer and maybe pull off a miracle.
B) Give up and file bankruptcy.
Of course they lied to us. From their perspective it was the only rational thing to do! Life Technologies is different in that they have more money than they can invest (they use excess funds for buying their own stock). They have little to gain in lying to us.
2.: Part of Life Technologies business model is selling quality reagents at a premium. They get away with this because their brands have a positive image. Lying to their customers puts that image at danger. So unlike for the other companies the only thing that lying about their product does for them is to put their brand equity at risk.
3.: With the PGM they have shown that their technology works, that its scalable, generates sales and their announcements come true. Why believe that this should be any different for the Proton?Comment
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I'm just joking but I have been around sequencing for almost 25 years now, a good part of it within some of the big players. The reality on the inside is always a little bit sarcastic than that dreamy rosie world of sequencing. Now, my time is more within true clinical applications. My general feeling is that 99% of folks using sequencers have little understanding of the realm of direct to patient diagnostic. Hell, weren't we supposed to have a 501K sequencer at some point ?
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i only saw a press release for the first milestone payment. Did IT actually meet the milestones for the whole 700 million?Originally posted by steinmann View PostComment
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Yes, they mentioned the second (300 million) milestone payment in the Q1 earnings report.Comment
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Lemme tell you, that sequencing market for Life Tech is exploding. They can't sell enough of them. They can barely close the bank doors... It's gonna be a rocking cost cutting quarter with a few serious patent wars to come too. Prepare yourself for some aggressive reps... Now is the time to get your questionable free Ipad...Comment
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Well that's some truly exciting news!Comment
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Looks like someone with serious money agrees with me and wants to buy the whole company.
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Perhaps, but read that link more carefully -- the company thinks they can get a good price at a sale; the article is not suggesting that someone else is already trying to buy them.Comment
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I did read it very carefully. All I said is that it looks like someone wants to buy them.
To me all of this is rather odd. Where did the financial post get that information from? From the official side Life issued a press release that said nothing but that they hired a bunch of bankers "to assist in its annual strategic review". What the hell is that supposed to mean? Why would you want to issue such a cryptic two sentence press release?
All we know for sure is that this was sufficient to bump the stock price by 10%.Comment
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From what I can tell, it looks like the press release was sent out in response to rumors that were building up due to their 'strategic review'. The press release is probably just a CYA move to say 'hey, all that's happening is this - nothing more (yet)"Originally posted by steinmann View PostComment
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It's pure speculation on my part, but this could be the beginning of Roche getting their hands on Ion Torrent. The 'strategic review' could result in a breakup of the company, separating the high-growth NGS business from the relatively slow-growth reagents business. I think a split like this would make an acquisition by Roche much more likely.Comment
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