Google, PacBio and ONT all produce software for e.g. base/variant-calling, but it’s not obvious to me why they would want to go beyond that. What’s the natural next step? Variant effect prediction? Really tough problem with no natural commercialisation link (in their product, at least).
For PacBio and ONT I am not sure. Google I guess would want to make sequencing a commodity. For illumina? Polygenic risk scores in healthcare I guess. All the public polygenic risk score predictors suck. They should change that if they want to make that space a commodity. Fund the personal genome project (the project fizzled out with 400K+ volunteers because they don’t have enough funding to sequence people!). I would also personally be interested in that, so partally motivated reasoning. But when I asked Claude to check online it tells me they make more money in healthcare than in research now.
I have no idea what innovation looks like in PRS. ML is all good but the bottleneck is (presumably) phenotyping which none of these companies want to do.
Okay, I should probably caveat this by saying that Google does have a phenotyping service in the sense of Google Health and related products, but I’m not aware of any work in this area and I’m not sure how much things like heart rate/BMI etc. are usable in genomic research. Or that they can even be released to be used in this way.
Google, PacBio and ONT all produce software for e.g. base/variant-calling, but it’s not obvious to me why they would want to go beyond that. What’s the natural next step? Variant effect prediction? Really tough problem with no natural commercialisation link (in their product, at least).
For PacBio and ONT I am not sure. Google I guess would want to make sequencing a commodity. For illumina? Polygenic risk scores in healthcare I guess. All the public polygenic risk score predictors suck. They should change that if they want to make that space a commodity. Fund the personal genome project (the project fizzled out with 400K+ volunteers because they don’t have enough funding to sequence people!). I would also personally be interested in that, so partally motivated reasoning. But when I asked Claude to check online it tells me they make more money in healthcare than in research now.
I have no idea what innovation looks like in PRS. ML is all good but the bottleneck is (presumably) phenotyping which none of these companies want to do.
Okay, I should probably caveat this by saying that Google does have a phenotyping service in the sense of Google Health and related products, but I’m not aware of any work in this area and I’m not sure how much things like heart rate/BMI etc. are usable in genomic research. Or that they can even be released to be used in this way.