What customers say about 2012 in the NGS field: Illumina still more usable but Life is promising!

An interesting survey recently appeared on InSequence (from GenomeWeb) make the point about customers opinions on the NGS platforms available nowadays. The survey was conducted with 26 questions proposed to 99 respondents selected from the GenomeWeb readers. Around 55 percent of them work in a government or academic setting, while others have been chosen from hospital, reference labs and biopharmaceutical firms.

The depicted scenario is quite clear: Illumina still unbeaten in throughput, accuracy and usability and a slightly advantage in ease of sample preparation. Life Tech (basically PGM and Proton platforms) confirmed its dominance in reagent and instrument prices and run time. Both solutions stay substantially even talking about read length. Moreover, the Life technology ability to deliver the promised rapid technological improvements on ION platforms seems to pay: ION platforms seems to be more accredited for future development, as more users answer positively when asked if the company sequencers are promising for future improvements.

This reflects quite well the present situation on the NGS market, with Illumina still dominating, with around 60%, and Life ascending thanks to its new platforms, ranking now at about 25%. As a consequence of the claimed high accuracy and thorughput, Illumina HiSeq are still also the preferred platform for eventual large clinical application, while MiSeq has only recently taken a slight advantage over PGM, following Illumina announcement of the CLIA approved MiSeqDx.

You can also follow changes in customers perspective over the last 6 months compairing the last survey with the one conducted in April, 2012.

There is another interesting trend emerging: most of customers declared that they will increase they sequence production of at least 50% in 2013 over 2012 and that they prefer to do it in house. In fact,  49 out of 99 respondents disagreeing or strongly disagreeing with the statement that they'd be more likely to outsource sequencing. However it seems that this increase in production will not be achieved by increasing "hardware", since around half of responder either disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement "I will purchase a new NGS instrument in 12 months" and only a quarter are agree or strongly agree with that.