At the recent Advances in GenomeBiology and Technology in Marco Island, Florida, the focus was on the new, low-end machines like MiSeq and the Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine, which was the subject of this Forbes cover story.
It is the company that was founded by gene guru Craig Venter that was going to beat the government at deciphering the genome and become the Bloomberg of biology by selling genetic data.
Researchers have unravelled much of the basic molecular biology of cancer and, aided by the outpouring of knowledge that the Human Genome Project has yielded over the past ten years, they have come to understand how the disease progresses.