2014 in the Rearview Mirror

The holiday season always triggers some nostalgia, and here at Sage Science headquarters we’re thinking about what a big year 2014 has been for us. We hit some big milestones, including our 1,000th Pippin customer, moving to larger office space to fit our expanding operations, and our first foray into the proteomics market. We launched two major products this year, and we’re really excited about both: the SageELF, which performs whole-sample fractionation for DNA or proteins, and the PippinHT, a high-throughput version of our automated DNA sizing platform that can handle as many as 24 samples in a run.

It has been really gratifying to see just how many applications our clever customers are tackling with their Pippin instruments. We detailed several of these applications in a blog series on how people are pairing Pippin with Illumina NGS platforms, and we also got some great new app notes about using BluePippin with PacBio’s sequencer. We were proud to see the first customer poster highlighting work on the new SageELF.

We attended a lot of conferences this year, and the takeaway from all of them is that genomic studies are scaling more rapidly than even the most optimistic researchers might have predicted. There’s been tremendous growth in study size, notable expansion in the kinds of organisms being sequenced, and traction for genomic technologies beyond the traditional community into areas like histocompatibility typing and more. Based on the momentum, we are confident that next year holds even more awe-inspiring progress toward goals such as battling cancer, understanding the genetic basis of rare and common diseases, and influencing the microbiome to improve human health. You can look back at specific conference coverage for these meetings: ASHG, Beyond the Genome, ASMS, SFAF, ASM, ABRF, AGBT, and the PacBio user group meetings (spring and fall).

There were so many terrific publications from Sage customers this year. We’re impressed by all of them, but if you only have a few minutes, these are not to be missed:

• Evan Eichler’s effort to improve the human reference genome
• Proof-of-principle showing that genome editing can shorten a pathogenic repeat expansion into non-pathogenic range
• ABRF’s evaluation of RNA-seq platforms
• NHGRI’s analysis of antibiotic-resistant disease transmission at the NIH Clinical Center

Finally, we had the privilege of showcasing some Pippin customers and their terrific work this year. Check them out:

Hazel Barton, University of Akron
Bobby Sebra, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Paul Scheid, New York University

Thanks for a great 2014, and happy holidays from all of us at Sage!

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