Yesterday, Roche (kind-of) announced a new sequencing technology they will be bringing to market that uses SBX, or sequencing-by-expansion. Their web page includes a video that is basically 4 years old, since it is identical to this video from Stratos, which they acquired in 2020.
In the Roche announcement, they notably left out almost all of the detail people would expect, like performance specs, yield, even read length (!). They did provide comment that they would be launching in 2026, and that the focus would be in specific diagnostic areas with “full end-to-end workflows”, but that’s about it.
Based on the posted video, though, I think we can speculate on read lengths. We don’t know the read lengths that a Genia nanopore can produce, but if it’s on the order of what an Oxford nanopore can produce, say 30kb, and an Xpandomer creates a molecule 50x the length of the target DNA sequence, it sounds like we’re looking at up to 600-bp DNA reads.
Big questions from me are around how consistently their chemistry can produce the promised read length, whether their nanopore performs as well or better than Oxford’s, and what their longer-term roadmap looks like. Will this technology stack be capped at 600-bp reads? Is there line-of-sight to covering a whole genome? Only time will tell!