Genome sequencing instruments have gotten so much faster and cheaper over the years that they have created a new problem for scientists—digging through mountains of data on DNA, and maintaining these stores of data. So today, Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies and its Applied Biosystems division have formed a partnership with Seattle-based Geospiza to help researchers store that information on someone else’s servers and get access to it anywhere via the Internet.
Financial terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. But this is the first time a leading gene sequencing company has agreed to offer the whole package of the sequencing instrument, the consumable chemicals needed to run experiments, and the software needed to sort through and make sense of the data, says Geospiza president Rob Arnold. It’s also the first time a major sequencing company has taken the leap into cloud computing. In this case, that means researchers will agree to store their data on common servers that are maintained by another company (Amazon Web Services). Which means researchers don’t have to buy their own equipment or hire their own bio-IT person to manage all the precious data on the lab’s internal hard drives.
“This will provide a lot of important visibility for the importance of data analysis through Life Technologies’ sales force,” Arnold says. “This is a very important acknowledgement that the cost to collect and produce the data is continuing to drop, and that the cost to analyze the data is becoming a larger IT problem.”
The partnership means that Life’s sales staff will remind scientists who use the Applied Biosystems SOLiD system for next-generation sequencing that they can dump all of the vast genomic data that tool produces onto Amazon’s Web Services platform. The scientists will be able to use Geospiza’s tools to help visualize the data and spot useful patterns in them, like a common gene variation that might be linked with the spread of cancer. The Applied Biosystems instrument sells for $550,000, the chemical reagents needed to run experiments can cost more than $100,000 a year, and the Geospiza software for storing, and analyzing the data costs $30,000 a year, plus $2,500 per user for an added feature, Arnold says.
Life Technologies (NASDAQ: [[ticker:LIFE]]) has 9,700 employees in more than 100 countries around the world, and had $3.1 billion in revenue last year, so it has a lot more horsepower to spread word around the world than Geospiza does to get scientists to change their computing habits. Geospiza recently raised $750,000 in angel financing, which will help it add some sales and scientific staff to gear up for the increased demand it anticipates from the partnership with Life Technologies, Arnold says. By renting server space from Amazon, Geospiza is able to use the new capital to hire more people instead of spending money on more servers, he says.
Since Geospiza is private, Arnold doesn’t disclose sales or sales forecasts, but the company expects to see growth this year from this partnership. The makers of next-generation sequencing instruments—-Life Technologies, Illumina, Roche, and Helicos Biosciences—have largely ignored the computing needs of their customers, Arnold says. That’s changing now because labs are struggling so much under the weight of the data from these machines—which can produce 200 million data points per slide—to the point that it’s bogging down labs and hurting sales of instruments, he says.
“We really see this market as a three-legged stool,” Arnold says. “There’s instruments, chemical reagents, and software you need to do these experiments. Up to this point, Life Technologies has been dealing with just two of the three legs, and they understand they need to support their customers with all three legs.”
This has started to become a sore point with Wall Street analysts
