Low-Cost sequencers to Drive Growth in NGS Installed Base

First quarter announcements by two early makers of low-cost NGS machines suggests that brisk sales of the platforms will likely boost the overall installed base of NGS machines deployed into labs worldwide.  In mid-April, a spokes person from Roche 454 Life Scicences said that “We are pleased with the rapid adoption of the GS Junior System in the market.”  The person also said that 454 had “placed hundreds of GS Junior instruments in laboratories worldwide.”

To me, “hundreds of instruments” could be interpreted as at least 300-400 instruments. That’s quite a lot of 454 GS Junior instruments shipped since its launch last May. Most of what I have read about the GS Junior suggested that the instument have limited utility and may  have disappointed some users.  Brisk sales of the GS Junior is a surprise to me.

Life Technologies made an announcement about its low-cost Ion Torrent sequencer as part of its first quarter financial release. They said that their Q1 orders were greater than what they had expected.  They said the the strong order rate suggests that they might sell more Ion Torrent PGMs over the next 12-months that will exceed the installed base of the leading NGS instrument.  I assumed that he was referring to the installed base of the Illumina GA series of NGS machines. The Univ. of Birminkgham website shows that the self-reported installed base for Illumina GAs to be over 660.  I suspect that this website lags the real installed base by a few hundred. I read that LIfe Technologies had initial orders for 60 or so PGMs.  So I would expect that exceeding their original expections could be interpreted as 100 to 130 shipments for the PGMs for Q1. If LIfe’ shipment estimates do materialize, then sometime next April the installed base of Ion Torrent PGMs will reach about 670.

I estimate that the accumulated installed base of 454 GS Junior machines that might be deployed by next April would be about 650. So together, The installed base for the two low-cost NGS platforms might reach an installed base of 1,320 instruments.

If I assume that Illumina’s MiSeq instrument rolls out sometime in August and they have a run rate that is similar to the Ion Torrent, they might ship about 400 by next April.  Add that number to the mix and a conservative guestimate of the installed base for low-cost NGS machines might reach 1,720 machines by then. I can see that democratization of DNA sequencing will begin to take effect in mid-2012.