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Yes, but I would say quality is most important in almost all cases. Well, quality being defined as <1% error rate, which isn’t such a high bar.

The most compelling near term applications (NITP etc) use fragmented DNA, and long reads will have no benefit here.

So, yes. Long reads are useful, but you need to have at least reasonable performance in other respects. The same thing has been seen with PacBio, who have not played well in the market, despite having a read length advantage.

Do you have a citation for this? Because this is not my understanding.

Most clinical applications don’t need long reads. Pathogen identification from short reads is easy. Blood tests for cancer, and NIPT (which will likely be the first big applications) both use fragmented DNA in the blood, so long reads are not useful. Depth (lots of sequencing) and quality are far more important.

They’re going to need more money.

I think they’d need to sell >10,000 units a month. That is if they are making any kind of profit. Unfortunately I don’t think there’s a market for anything like that number of flow cells.

I think they like to say they have a patent monopoly, but I don’t believe they do. Genia (which also has issues) are developing a protein nanopore platform.

Illumina (see recent IP battle with Oxford Nanopore) also have key IP in this space (for mspA).

I would guess they currently make a loss on every device shipped. Most current sales are about generating press coverage/traction, not revenue.

The accounts of all UK companies are filed publicly. They had about 1M GBP of sales in 2016 from memory. I would guess with overheads, each unit is currently sold at a loss.

Illumina doesn’t beat nanopore because of the “scale” it beats it because the technology produces fundamentally higher accuracy data. The error rate on Nanopore reads is >10%. Even on first generation Illumina machines the error rate was 1%, and is now significantly lower.

Oxford Nanopore have been working on this for 15 years, this is the best they can do. It might be possible to create a Nanopore (maybe solid state, not protein) system with a lower error rate, but I think they have little hope of doing it.

That might be the case if the throughput wasn’t so low and the error rate wasn’t so high.

I’d agree with you, that long reads would be useful if the error rate wasn’t so shockingly bad.

There is, likely value in long reads, but what non-niche research applications are there for highly error’d reads that justify a valuation of several billion dollars?

NextSeq is expensive, but there are cheaper options (from 30k) and you can just send your samples to a sequencing service. I’ve seen costs for a whole human genome at high coverage of between 1 and 3000USD.

That’s great, but for a company that has raised on a valuation of >2BUSD how are they going to compete with Illumina.

The read lengths might be long, but the error rate is a couple of orders of magnitude higher. I can’t see a market large enough for highly error’d log reads to support their valuation.

It’s also comparatively expensive compared to other platforms (you can get a full human genome sequenced at high coverage for between 1000 and 3000 USD).

The error rate is stupidly high (somewhere between 10 and 20%) compared to Illumina or Ion Torrent who give error rates far less than 1%.

It can give very long reads, which are useful in some niche applications. But it’s been massively over-hyped (and over capitalized).

The neat thing is that it’s very small. But that isn’t really compelling given the very low accuracy.

Work for a year then take two years off? Or retire earlier? Again, I didn’t say that people wouldn’t work at all. I said that the barrier to obtaining a personal autonomy is too high in a society where providing the essentials of life has been largely automated.

We keep people working by making it had to survive otherwise (high rents that don’t represent the maintainence/construction costs etc).

Can be useful when you’re looking after kids, you’re carrying a child/stuck away from your phone.

I’d guess voice assistance could be useful in other situations too. But for me the error rate still seems too high, and there are limited applications.

I’m not really talking about providing a basic income.

What I’m saying is the barrier to having “personal autonomy” in a society where providing the essentials of life has to a high degree already been automated, is too high.