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  • #16
    Originally posted by pmiguel View Post
    Maybe PacBio rejected most of the entities trying to order the Sequel.

    --
    Phillip
    That's exactly what I was thinking. I have been going over it since they began giving me the run around. To be honest: that is part of the reason I bought so much of their stock. I have never experienced anything like that before.

    Think about it: they blew off someone who was calling and emailing them daily to please sell them 3 machines. For a wire transfer. Immediately. Months ago. And at least 6 months before we would have received the first machine.

    In other words, they didn't want to take too many orders. That means that they know demand is high but they need to manually slow it down. I have zero trust in most publicly traded biotech companies (don't be mad if you own or work at one...I have little trust in other fields as well). If things were normal then they would have been falling over themselves to take my $1 million and book it for that quarter's sales.

    I called them out on it. Told them I was gonna buy a ton of stock. Then I did that. Then I called back and told them what I did and asked if there were any chance they would take my order. They hung up on me. That's all I needed to know. Something was up. Clinics and labs have this machine. The papers are coming out. Someone bigger bought another one. I am pretty sure Carl Icahn got in on it as an investor.

    They are messing with orders to mess with the stock price. That is my guess. I gambled on that and have made money based on that assumption.

    I know. I just wrote a lot. But I feel we are hours or days away from knowing something. Hopefully it is good news.

    Comment


    • #17
      I believe they mentioned they would be restricting orders for the first quarter or two. They mainly want to ship to repeat US customers initially. So I wouldn't be surprised if a number of people were told to come back in 3 months to place an order. Which makes sense given their big screw up with the RS. They shipped too many too soon and didn't have the proper infrastructure to manage all the sites. Especially since the RS was buggy as hell. Most customers began to actively trash talk the instrument and it gave pacbio a horrible reputation that took years to fix. They're going to be careful not to make the same mistake by slowly ramping up volume with customer sites they can trust.

      Also there are some strong rumors roche put a $20 offer to buy them. I wonder if we will hear anything soon.

      Comment


      • #18
        Originally posted by spore View Post
        I believe they mentioned they would be restricting orders for the first quarter or two. They mainly want to ship to repeat US customers initially. So I wouldn't be surprised if a number of people were told to come back in 3 months to place an order. Which makes sense given their big screw up with the RS. They shipped too many too soon and didn't have the proper infrastructure to manage all the sites. Especially since the RS was buggy as hell. Most customers began to actively trash talk the instrument and it gave pacbio a horrible reputation that took years to fix. They're going to be careful not to make the same mistake by slowly ramping up volume with customer sites they can trust.

        Also there are some strong rumors roche put a $20 offer to buy them. I wonder if we will hear anything soon.
        There is definitely something going on internally. For sure, they have received an offer.

        $20 is too low, in my opinion.

        I believe that they wanted only existing customers who know their chemistry to receive the first Sequels. But I don't believe that they didn't take my orders because they were afraid of bad press from a disgruntled lab. I believe that they were told to limit orders to new customers so they could guage interest and then use that internal info to keep the share price low. I know...it does sound super conspiratorial. But, it is what I would have done if it were legal. I would want to keep the price low so that I could keep buying stock. Then, I would take those pent up orders and add them the following quarter to falsely inflate sales growth. They can't ship anyhow. There is no damage to them in showing mediocre sales for the Sequel this quarter. If they delay a ton of orders this quarter then add them next quarter, it will make them look like Sequel growth is parabolic. That is more interesting to a company looking to buy them. Much more interesting than 49 initial orders. Parabolic sales growth will drive up the offer price for the company.

        They refused my orders 3 times because they didn't want some unknown company (my company) taking 3 early spots in the delivery queue. They didn't want to book that sale. Am I gonna pursue it? No. I profited off of what I gathered. Even if I got everything wrong and the real reason they didn't accept my order was truly because I didn't have an appropriate company logo (yup...they really told me that)...I don't care anymore. I made almost a million bucks off of Pac Bio. In 3 months. And if they get bought..I will make more. And...if I still want their machine in 6 months, I will use that million bucks to purchase it on the open market. The best part of all: if I am TOTALLY off base and I misconstrued everything....I still made a million bucks (so far). But I doubt I am wrong.

        Also, just for the record, if they sell for $20 then management has no long term confidence in their technology. This machine, if the specs are for real, is a difference maker. I know people here keep thinking I am crazy about that. But...I'm not.

        Comment


        • #19
          In hindsight some of your conspiracy theories may end up true. The stock tanked this quarter while pacbio handed out record levels of options at a cheap price to their executives. If they report >100 bookings for this quarter then I suspect you were right about them limiting orders.

          Of course the alternative is the box isn't working well and bookings are low and investors got wind of that and pulled out.

          It looks like a few service providers have received their sequels. Does anyone have information on how the sequencing data is or if these service providers and now allowing customers to sequence using sequel?

          Comment


          • #20
            They were, kinda, conspiracy theories. We sold our initial holdings when the stock hit $11.70 and finished when it hit $13. We bought another 75,000 shares when it dipped below $6 a while back. We are still holding onto that (with a sell order scheme set up to execute if it approaches $6).

            I so badly wanna know what is going on with the Sequel. The drop in the stock price is partly due to Pac Bio selling shares to cover expected costs this year. And partly due to Oxford's patent leak due to the potential lawsuit from Illumina. It may also be partly due to lousy data from the first group of machines, but I have not heard much yet either.

            This company's history of being dishonest...ugh...it was the boldest financial risk I have taken in a LONG time when I bought that stock an hour after the Sequel press release last year. I hope they are not lying again and I still hope they are bought out (preferably by a company that won't be afraid to spend on R&D).

            Lastly, I hope Oxford beats everyone to it and I can buy their solution instead. I rarely see posts here in the Oxford sub. In my opinion, it should be more active.

            Comment


            • #21
              Roche made an offer but Pacbio rejected it because it was too low. Honestly if they sold the company to Roche that would be the best thing to advance their technology. There's a lot of untapped potential they could reach by just throwing more money in R&D. Their cash situation has definitely held back the technology quite a bit.

              As for the data, it's been about 5 months since launch and still no publicly released data. I think they'll be hitting a point soon where they wont really have any excuse on why data hasn't been released. It's either working or it isnt.

              ONT is probably a worse company in terms of lying. It'll be years before they can reliably sell commercial products. Their miniIon has uses in academia but still needs a lot of work to put a dent in the commercial market. But they've lied so much over the past few years who knows what to believe.

              Comment


              • #22
                That's the thing in bio, even up to the hardware "manufacturers": management tells lies and hopes that the engineers can make their lies true. I am not going to go out on a limb and say they're inflating their specs. I really want the specs to be accurate. If so, then the long term with Pacific Bio looks good. I'll be a customer that they dislike, but I'll use their machines and consumables. And I'll use them a lot.

                Someone should buy Oxford AND Pacific Bio. That way they can compete with Illumina in nano-pore. Oxford, if they end up working, would be perfect for every lab and they would be perfect for hospitals and some clinics. The Sequel is perfect for medium and larger labs, sequencing service providers, large clinical trials, research hospitals, and the most important of all: government cancer-research money.

                Comment


                • #23
                  Originally posted by math_guy View Post

                  Lastly, I hope Oxford beats everyone to it and I can buy their solution instead. I rarely see posts here in the Oxford sub. In my opinion, it should be more active.
                  I guess it is because they have their own community so you are more likely to get a response there. If you have not already, now would be a good time to try out the MinION. I am sure you could spare $1000 if you are thinking of buying three Sequels, without seeing any data... I find it strange that even their Sequel brochures only show RS-II results, looks like they had to rush it. Specs loks good and of course CCS accuracy is nice but I don't see how it could scale to be competitive with 10x on X10 and the next gen nanopores.

                  Comment


                  • #24
                    Originally posted by Ola View Post
                    I guess it is because they have their own community so you are more likely to get a response there. If you have not already, now would be a good time to try out the MinION. I am sure you could spare $1000 if you are thinking of buying three Sequels, without seeing any data... I find it strange that even their Sequel brochures only show RS-II results, looks like they had to rush it. Specs loks good and of course CCS accuracy is nice but I don't see how it could scale to be competitive with 10x on X10 and the next gen nanopores.
                    We will begin an attempt to review Oxford and the MinION. I am starting to get even more uncertain of Pacific Bio. I am still wondering why we have seen very little data on the Sequel. It makes me feel that there is something going on. But maybe I am just being too critical. However...how long does it take to start distributing some data? Shouldn't Pacific Bio be releasing some as well, by this point in time?

                    What makes you feel that the system couldn't scale very well compared to unannounced technology? Is there a known cap with Pacific Bio's tech?

                    Comment


                    • #25
                      Originally posted by Ola View Post
                      I guess it is because they have their own community so you are more likely to get a response there. If you have not already, now would be a good time to try out the MinION. I am sure you could spare $1000 if you are thinking of buying three Sequels, without seeing any data... I find it strange that even their Sequel brochures only show RS-II results, looks like they had to rush it. Specs loks good and of course CCS accuracy is nice but I don't see how it could scale to be competitive with 10x on X10 and the next gen nanopores.
                      Actually the Pacbio Sequel technology scales the best out of all the technologies. They integrated all the optics onto a camera sensor so it's not hard at all for them to just use a higher res sensor to increase the thoughput. They already expect in 2017/2018 time frame to have a chip with 5 million ZMW's and they can keep increasing that number easily because the sensor technology is already there. The 5 million ZMW sensor would already give cheaper sequencing than the X10. Not to mention they usually 2x their read length every year too.

                      Illumina was caught off guard and quickly announced firefly for late 2017. This is essentially doing the same thing as pacbio did with Sequel. But it won't scale as well because illumina has to use larger wells that take up more space so you can't fit as many sequencing wells on a chip as pacbio can. Illumina is also read length and flow limited. They need to totally new technology to keep up with Pacbio in the long run.

                      Nanopore scales by just throwing more flow cells in the same instrument. This isn't really a good way to scale. It's VERY difficult to make nanopore reliably. That's why we don't see them coming out with new chips with 100k+ nanopores on them. Until they can show they have found a scalable way to increase the nanopore count then the tech is not that scalable. Which probably won't happen until semiconductor nanopores are able to be fabricated.

                      Right now Pacbio definitely has the most scalable technology.

                      Comment


                      • #26
                        Originally posted by spore View Post
                        Actually the Pacbio Sequel technology scales the best out of all the technologies. They integrated all the optics onto a camera sensor so it's not hard at all for them to just use a higher res sensor to increase the thoughput. They already expect in 2017/2018 time frame to have a chip with 5 million ZMW's and they can keep increasing that number easily because the sensor technology is already there. The 5 million ZMW sensor would already give cheaper sequencing than the X10. Not to mention they usually 2x their read length every year too.

                        ...

                        Nanopore scales by just throwing more flow cells in the same instrument. This isn't really a good way to scale. It's VERY difficult to make nanopore reliably. That's why we don't see them coming out with new chips with 100k+ nanopores on them. Until they can show they have found a scalable way to increase the nanopore count then the tech is not that scalable. Which probably won't happen until semiconductor nanopores are able to be fabricated.

                        Right now Pacbio definitely has the most scalable technology.
                        That is good to know, I was not aware of the differences in optics between the two systems. It is great if it really is as scalable as you say.

                        It may well be difficult to make reliable nanopores, but the real challenge would be to get data out from 100k+ pores simultaneously (look at Proton PII and PIII). With scalable I thought more about producing instruments and sequences, not the actual detection units per flowcell. Running faster with more reads coming off each pore is obviously also one way to scale.

                        Comment


                        • #27
                          Originally posted by spore View Post
                          Actually the Pacbio Sequel technology scales the best out of all the technologies.
                          From our perspective, PacBio's advantages are true long reads and low consensus error rates. Total output improvements (in terms of Gb and # of reads) hasn't really been their strength (although the Sequel does look like a significant step up).

                          PacBio has done a decent job of scaling over the past couple of years, but they haven't scaled nearly as fast as Illumina (in terms of output per run or output per unit time). Has something changed that makes you think they'll start scaling faster than the ~4x/yr improvements (from a relatively small base) that they've achieved over the past few years?
                          AllSeq - The Sequencing Marketplace
                          [email protected]
                          www.AllSeq.com

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                          • #28
                            Yeah the optics between the two systems was the big change. That's why the instrument is now 1/4 of the size.

                            Of course all of this depends on Pacbio actually proving Sequel works. It's been 4 months and still no hard data. I would assume they should have ran plenty of internal experiments and published the data by now. My guess is they won't publish anything that has worse data than the RS gives. If they havent published anything by may then I think management jumped the gun and launched a product that wasn't ready.

                            Comment


                            • #29
                              Originally posted by AllSeq View Post
                              From our perspective, PacBio's advantages are true long reads and low consensus error rates. Total output improvements (in terms of Gb and # of reads) hasn't really been their strength (although the Sequel does look like a significant step up).

                              PacBio has done a decent job of scaling over the past couple of years, but they haven't scaled nearly as fast as Illumina (in terms of output per run or output per unit time). Has something changed that makes you think they'll start scaling faster than the ~4x/yr improvements (from a relatively small base) that they've achieved over the past few years?
                              Previous throughput increases on the RS were because of RL increasing. With Sequel they have two area's they can increase throughput with
                              1) RL
                              2) # of ZMW's

                              I assume they should be able to do better than the 4x/year because they can now come out with chips with a lot more ZMW's. I saw some slides from a conference where Pacbio expects a 5-6million ZMW chip by 2018. So that's a 6x increase just on ZMW's. If you assume they keep doubling their readlength every year that would add another 4x over the next two years. So that would be about a 24x increase over 2 years (assuming a 6M ZMW chip and ~50k readlength by 2018).

                              They can also tweak the speed of the sequencing reaction to increase the throughput. This is something they havent done yet though.

                              If this technology does work then they will catch up to Illumina fairly quickly. That's why I think the best option is for them to sell to Roche. Roche can dump millions into the company and really let the technology thrive.

                              Comment


                              • #30
                                Originally posted by math_guy View Post
                                We will begin an attempt to review Oxford and the MinION. I am starting to get even more uncertain of Pacific Bio. I am still wondering why we have seen very little data on the Sequel. It makes me feel that there is something going on. But maybe I am just being too critical. However...how long does it take to start distributing some data? Shouldn't Pacific Bio be releasing some as well, by this point in time?

                                What makes you feel that the system couldn't scale very well compared to unannounced technology? Is there a known cap with Pacific Bio's tech?
                                One limitation with the PacBio is that it relies on very long reads since it (currently) only does one read per ZMW, and increased read lengths does not increase throughput if you can't make libraries to match. And "throwing in more flowcells" is not a bad thing if they are cheap. Will see soon how the new chemistry and base callers perform on MinION, I am hoping PacBio can keep up but with no Sequel data out yet I would not bet on it.

                                For those who have not followed the recent ONT updates you can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nizGyutn6v4
                                Last edited by Ola; 03-22-2016, 05:21 AM.

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