In this post-90’s biotech era which we all inhabit, I’m finding that brand recognition is becoming a confusing game indeed. Old favourite boutique vendors like Molecular Probes have been swallowed up by enormous, multi-tentacled distributors like Invitrogen, and keeping track of who’s distributing your favourite brand of pipettor, or water filter, or tissue culture media, can make for hours of fun and games. Even the big players keep getting bought and sold – just try to sort out the whole Merck/EMD fine chemical business, or the ownership structure of VWR, if you have some time to kill. And I’m still trying to get my head around Thermo Fisher. What does Thermo Electron have to do with distributing pipette tips and latex gloves? How, if at all, is this related to Thermo Finnigan? It makes my head hurt just thinking about it.
And then there’s my personal favourite suite of technologies du jour, loosely grouped into “next-generation” DNA sequencing, or NGS. Illumina buys Solexa, Applied Biosystems buys Agencourt Personal Genomics (but not Agenourt Bioscience, which is owned by Beckman Coulter – are you following this?), Roche gobbles up 454 Life Sciences. Pacific Biosciences is next, mark my words, with rumours of intense interest from Applied Biosystems, and probably many others. Helicos too, perhaps, so look for a merger or acquisition there, although with a market cap of $147 million and $50 million in the bank at the end of 2007, they could probably stay on their own for a while.
In the case of Illumina’s almost-works-most-of-the-time Genome Analyzer, most people still call it a “Solexa”. At the recent AGBT conference, which I’ve rattled on about in more detail elsewhere, practically the only people using the term “Illumina Genome Analyzer” were members of the large posse of Illumina employees in attendance. And most people don’t call the ex-454 machine a “Roche” GS-FLX; to most, it’s still a “454”, although this seems to me to be waning a bit under the crushing weight of Roche’s marketing machinery. Remarkably, the 454 Life Sciences website still exists, and is still a much, much better source of information on this NGS system than the Roche website, which is large, messy, and rather full of the 150,000 other things that Roche sells.
On the other hand, Applied Biosystems seems to have triumphed in branding their SOLiD system, and virtually nobody seems to remember that this was developed by Agencourt Personal Genomics and that the chemistry used was, for a time, referred to as the “APG process”, even by AB itself. Now it’s just SOLiD, small “i” and all, and the scientific community in general seems to have accepted that brand. Timing, I suppose, is everything.
Now, if someone could just explain to me why all these darn NGS boxes are blue…
