Pacific Biosciences is considering a new business model that aims to extract additional revenue from the data generated using its sequencers and kits.
The strategy would build on a new multi-year strategic collaboration to integrate its HiFi long-read sequencing with Verily Health’s data and artificial intelligence platform, called Verily Pre.
Under the collaboration, announced Oct. 19, Verily will configure Pre Workbench, its secure research environment, to connect PacBio sequencing workflows for aggregating, analyzing, and curating HiFi datasets.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, however, PacBio CEO Mark Van Oene told Ion Genomics that it could allow both PacBio and its customers to reap new monetary benefits from genomic data.
Moreover, he said PacBio could soon be offering discounts on its instruments and consumables in exchange for the right to place resulting data in the Verily environment and charge for access, a significant shift in how the company monetizes its sequencing technology.
“I fundamentally believe that the data is worth more than the cost to generate it,” Van Oene said. “So I think it’s an important future revenue source for all of the life science tools companies, not just PacBio.”
Verily, an Alphabet (Google) subsidiary whose infrastructure is now cloud-agnostic, already hosts large datasets, including data from the All of Us research program. The All of Us data features approximately 12,000 long-read genomes among many more short-read genomes. PacBio’s human genome pipelines are already on the Verily platform, Van Oene said, including variant callers for structural variants and the rest of its secondary analysis suite.
In Monday morning trading on the Nasdaq, shares of PacBio were up 6 percent at $1.84.
