Midway through this year's Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conference, held in Florida in February, US company Pacific Biosciences sponsored a beachfront fireworks display to promote its name and celebrate its emergence from years in stealth mode.
Perhaps the 600 or so attendees were intended to imagine the exploding multi-coloured fireworks as a metaphor for the captured fluorescence at the heart of the company's novel DNA sequencing technology.
But it turns out that Pacific Biosciences didn't really need to burn money on pyrotechnics after all. The closing talk, by company founder and chief technology officer Stephen Turner, was all the delegates could talk about.
"How cool was that?!" purred Washington University's Elaine Mardis, following Turner's talk. Writing in his Tree of Life blog, evolutionary geneticist Jonathan Eisen said Turner's talk "really did blow my mind ... The long reads, coupled with many molecules per run, plus the high speed, this technology is the first I have seen that has shown some results and that could really lead to the $1000 human genome."
And Yu-Hui Rogers, scientific director of the J. Craig Venter Joint Technology Center, hailed the technology as "potentially revolutionary".
Such sentiments were echoed afterwards by many other academics and, interestingly, by staffers from most of the current crop of next-generation companies, no doubt girding for extra competition a few years down the road.
Turner confidently predicted that within five years, his technology will be able to produce a raw human sequence in less than three minutes, and a complete, high-quality sequence in just 15 minutes.
Genome scientists have heard similar hype before, but Turner's preliminary data left most of the audience believing that this technology has the potential to be truly disruptive.
The company's CEO, Hugh Martin, a former telecommunications executive, told Bio-IT World that a commercial instrument won't be ready until 2010 or 2011 at the earliest.
PacBio has raised almost $80 million thus far, and is looking to raise a lot more to finance commercialisation. But that didn't stop Martin from confidently proclaiming to The New York Times, "When we're ready, we're just going to win the X Prize."
