Christophe Lambert, Author at The Golden Helix Blog

Is Illumina Aiming to Compete with its Customers?

In a recent GenomeWeb article by Tony Fong, “Sequenom’s CEO ‘Puzzled’ by Illumina’s Buy of Verinata, Lays out 2013 Goals at JP Morgan,” Harry Hixson, Sequenom’s CEO, expresses puzzlement over why its major supplier, Illumina, is acquiring a Sequenom competitor in Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT), and thus apparently competing with…

Learning vs. Doing (or why that Ph.D. took 10 years)

What prevents scientists from being more productive and if we knew, could we do anything about it? I’d like to look at an often overlooked, but huge productivity inhibitor — bad multitasking. Many people put “excellent multitasker” on their resume as a badge of honor. We laud the efficiency of…

Influencing the Global Dialog on Healthcare

On September 16-17th, I attended the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperative (APEC) Health Systems Innovation Policy Dialog in San Francisco. It was a stimulating opportunity to look at global healthcare concerns from the perspective of developing and developed economies. There was much opportunity to dialog and frame the issues around transforming healthcare…

Stop Ignoring Experimental Design (or my head will explode)

Stop Ignoring Experimental Design (or my head will explode)

Over the past 3 years, Golden Helix has analyzed dozens of public and customer whole-genome and candidate gene datasets for a host of studies. Though genetic research certainly has a number of complexities and challenges, the number one problem we encounter, which also has the greatest repercussions, is born of…

Missing Heritability and the Future of GWAS

“Where is the missing heritability?” is a question asked frequently in genetic research, usually in the context of diseases that have large heritability estimates, say 60-80%, and yet where only perhaps 5-10% of that heritability has been found. The difficulty seems to come down to the common disease/common variant hypothesis…

Rising Above Uncertainty: Increasing Clinical Yield in Array-Based Cytogenetics

As Andy Ferrin and I drove the five-hour car ride home from a cytogenetics conference, we had a lot of time to reflect on the persistent themes we heard in presentations and dialog among conference attendees. Taking somewhat of an outsider view, we traced each complaint, each sigh of frustration,…