Profile

Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc. is an American biotechnology company founded in 2004 that develops and manufactures systems for gene sequencing and some novel real time biological observation.[failed verification] PacBio describes its platform as single molecule real time sequencing , based on the properties of zero-mode waveguides. The company's first commercial product, the PacBio RS, was sold to a limited set of customers in 2010 and was commercially released in early 2011. A subsequent version of the sequencer called the PacBio RS II was released in April 2013. On September 25, 2013 a partnership between Pacific Biosciences and Roche Diagnostics was announced for the development of in vitro diagnostic products using the technology, with Roche providing US$75,000,000 in the deal. In 2015, the company launched a new sequencing instrument called the Sequel System with approximately 7-fold greater capacity than the PacBio RS II. Then in April 2019 the company launched the Sequel II system with a further 8-fold increase in throughput. The company was founded based on research done at Cornell University that combined semiconductor processing and photonics with biotechnology research. Three graduate students in the lab of Professor Harold Craighead — Steve Turner, Jonas Korlach, and Mathieu Foquet — became the first employees.