I am pleased to announce that I have won an Ion Torrent PGM in Life Technologies’ European competition. I am currently in Lausanne, Switzerland for the formal announcement of the award. A press release and further details should be appearing any moment now on the press release section of Life Technologies’ web site and on their forum.
I am very excited about exploring the potential of Ion Torrent technology for unravelling the genomic epidemiology of bacterial pathogens in hospitals. We and others have already established the potential of high-throughput sequencing for this application. I am fortunate that in that I already have funding from the British Medical Research Council to genome-sequence over a hundred isolates of Acinetobacter baumannii using established approaches (454 and Illumina), plus the recent launch of a NIHR Centre for Surgical Reconstruction and Microbiology in Birmingham brings additional opportunities for genomic epidemiology of infection in trauma patients. We are thus well placed to benchmark Ion Torrent against other technologies for this purpose and exploit this technology to do more work more quickly and more cheaply than we could with established approaches.
I am looking forward to taking receipt of an Ion Torrent instrument in the next month or two and will keep readers posted with our experience of the PGM. But for now, I had better get back to that glass of Champagne!
In this age of instant blogging, companies and the rest of us should adopt zero tolerance of sub-optimal press releases (http://www.lifetechnologies.com/news-gallery/press-releases/2011/life-techologies-aouces-visioary-wiers-of-the-io-torret-pgm-grat.html), so here is what I suggested Ion Torrent should use, which avoids putting words in my mouth and avoids typos and nonsensical statements.
Life Technologies Announces Visionary Winners of the Ion Torrent PGM Grants Program in Europe
Winning Submittals Highlight Potential Breakthrough Applications to Advance Human Health
CARLSBAD, Calif. – Feb. 18, 2011 – Life Technologies Corporation (NASDAQ: LIFE), today announced Dr. Angel Carracedo and Dr. Mark Pallen as the winners of the European Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine (PGM™) Sequencer Grants Program.
Each scientist will receive an Ion PGM and because of the low costs and short run times of the Ion Torrent sequencing technology, these scientists will be able to give their labs real-time cost-effective flexibility in high-throughput sequencing of a sort unseen even in large core sequencing centers.
In addition, Ion Torrent has awarded three runners-up an Ion PGM sequencer to support their exceptional proposals. This award will enable the visionary scientists to conduct further research at an accelerated rate.
“In all of the proposals we saw innovative, often potentially breakthrough applications that were on the shelf simply because there was not a technology that had the speed, throughput, affordability and read length to make them practical,” said Dr. Jonathan M. Rothberg, Founder and President of Ion Torrent. “Ion Torrent is the only sequencing technology that offers the ability to do all your ‘next-gen’ research applications in your own lab, while enabling a new generation of research applications that need same day results.”
Award Winners
Dr. Carracedo, Director of the Galician Foundation of Genomic Medicine in Spain, was awarded the grant for his proposal to create a fast and affordable method for genetic screening of research samples from newborns.
“Up to now newborn genetic screening efforts have been limited by high cost, slow run times and limited throughput of existing sequencing technology,” said Carracedo. “Our research will be focused on developing a newborn screening based on Ion amplicon sequencing for Cystic fibrosis, Wilson’s disease, Hurler-Scheie disease and other congenital metabolic diseases.”
Dr. Pallen, Professor of Microbial Genomics at the University of Birmingham in England, was awarded the grant for his proposal to identify, profile and type healthcare-associated bacterial pathogens in hospital settings– a huge and unmet problem that is now made solvable by the Ion PGM.
“The excessive run times and high costs of previous sequencing methods have severely limited the real-time use of sequencing in medical microbiology settings,” said Pallen. “The Ion PGM is already an order of magnitude cheaper and quicker with a performance rapidly improving in line with Moore’s law. The ability to deliver cheap same-day results is essential to enable timely interventions in outbreak management.”
Honorary Grant Winners Furthering Environmental and Ecological Research
Dr. Thomas Curtis, Professor of Environmental Engineering at Newcastle University, received an honorary grant for his proposal to routinely characterize the biology of waste treatment.
Dr. Howard Martin, Clinical Scientist, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and team, received a grant for their proposal to develop DNA sequence-based human leukocyte antigen (HLA) research.
Dr. Ulf Landegren, Professor of Molecular Medicine for the Department of Genetics and Pathology at the Uppsala University, received a grant for his research proposal to run a multiplex proximity ligation assay (MultiPLAy) to measure protein biomarkers in the blood by antibody-mediated reverse translation of proteins to DNA sequences.
The Ion PGM Sequencer Grant Program was designed to foster the development of new research applications for DNA sequencing that leverage the instrument’s unprecedented speed, scalability and low cost. These grants were also given in honor of the pioneering work of Drs. James Watson and Gordon Moore, which inspired the creation of the Ion Torrent semiconductor sequencing technology. The judges for the competition were Drs. Rothberg, Mathias Uhlen, George Church and Svante Pääbo.
For more information about the grant winners visit: http://www.iontorrent.com/forum/
Congrats! Looking forward to your results on using the Ion Torrent machine.
[...] up-close and personal pictures of our new Ion Torrent machine, installed at the University of Birmingham! #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item [...]
[...] two winners (out of ~150 entries) in the Ion Torrent PGM Grants Program in Europe. Check out the blog post from the time and this interview, which they filmed in the hotel in [...]