Well, it was a whirlwind few days at AGBT, where the talks were great and the after-parties pretty spectacular in their own right. This is my quick summary of some of the highlights of the conference. (DISCLAIMER -  I had to leave the conference early Saturday morning so I am unable to review any of the speakers or parties from Saturday).

Where to begin…?

Thursday started with a bang with talks by Heidi Rehm and Darrell Dinwiddie that highlighted how NGS has already entered the clinic. This was a central theme of the entire meeting and was something I was very excited to see. The meeting seems to be in a transition right now from technology focused to application focused, with the main application being healthcare and sequencing in the clinic. AGBT has seen over its 13 years this ebb and flow between technology and application. I expect many more application talks next year.

Thursday evening saw the presentation from Jonathan Rothberg and the new Proton platform from Life Technologies. While the talk was light on data presentation, there were some pretty bold claims such as the ability to sequence an entire human genome in a day for $1,000 on the Proton II chip due out by the end of 2012. So far they have hit all of their data generation metrics, let’s hope they make it to this one as well. Also, on Thursday evening Michael Zody from the Broad gave a very interesting talk on the dynamics of Dengue Fever disease severity. The evening was capped off by Caliper Life Sciences 2^nd Annual Up All Night Party from the Presidential Suite. While I personally did not stay up all night, I did talk to a few party-goers who made it to 5:00am. Ouch!

Friday gave us Rick Myers from Hudson Alpha and some fascinating work they are doing on human gene regulation, as well as Geoffery Smith from Illumina on how the MiSeq is being used in clinical microbiology. Joe Boland from NCI showed us how they are already using the ion torrent PGM to generate a whole human exome in a day using four 318 chips.

Then came the talk from Oxford Nanopore that set the conference abuzz. You can see my reaction in real time by following my twitter feed here. However, the highlight was the announcement of the minion, a disposable sequencer the size of a USB stick that can plug directly into your laptop for a price around $1,000. I’m not sure how good the data will be but the “cool factor” was off the charts. That said, I suggest a healthy dose of salt with this news. If the announcements from PacBio at this conference over the years can serve as our guide, it shows that no matter the technology, there are likely to remain several viable platforms to choose from over the coming years. To paraphrase, the deaths of Illumina and Life Tech have been exaggerated.

Friday evenings concurrent session on cancer was the highlight of the tracks presented that evening as Sean Grimmond from Univ of Queensland, David Smith from the Mayo Clinic, John McPherson of OICR, and Samuel Levy of Scripps all gave powerful presentations showing the use and utility of NGS platforms to yield new insights on cancer. The evening closed for me at the Life Tech ion Lounge party which featured a live band and a free Ion Torrent PGM that was raffled off and won by some researchers at NIST. Congratulations!

Not  a comprehensive list to be sure but hopefully something to whet the appetite of those who were unable to attend. Hoping to see all of you at next year’s meeting.

Dean