The Golden Helix team just returned from ESHG 2022 in Vienna, Austria. It was a great opportunity to speak with colleagues, customers, and partners face-to-face which many of us greatly missed. It has been three years since the last ESHG occurred in this format. Here are  three takeaways from this year’s show:

1. Strong bias to action: Some NGS initiatives that were planned pre-COVID had been postponed or even canceled due to labs shutting down or shifting focus towards building out COVID testing capabilities. Fast forward to 2022, labs are returning to their original agenda building out advanced NGS testing capabilities. In the current market environment, it is more important than ever to do this in a cost-efficient manner. In this context of capital markets tightening up and higher interest rates, the need to do this in the most capital-efficient manner is more important than ever. We hosted a corporate satellite talk “Maximizing Profitability within your NGS Workflow” to share the best practices for choosing and implementing software solutions within a lab. The feedback generated from this talk was very positive and initiated a follow-on webcast we will be conducting on July 20th. You can visit our website in early July to learn more details and save your seat.
2. Long-Read Sequencing is here to stay: Long-read sequencing technology has improved significantly, and the pricing is becoming increasingly attractive. There are now platform vendors touting the $100 genome which has been talked about in the industry for a number of years prior to those recent announcements. We are seeing that both research and clinical use cases are growing rapidly. We talked a lot about the bioinformatics implications of this development. We as Golden Helix are prepared for this and are optimizing our pipeline accordingly.
3. Whole Exome Sequencing landed on main street: NGS testing labs are leveraging exome tests in assessing inherited diseases based on singleton or trio analysis. In this context, the topic of scalability and automation was most important as the amount of data that needs to be processed is increasing rapidly. A lot of our in-booth demos were centered around this topic showing how our solutions are able to handle any size of workload. The ability to build scalable pipelines is a critical factor to consider as our industry continues to evolve.

Overall, we could not have been more pleased with our return to ESHG. It was a true delight getting to visit with new and familiar faces. We look forward to another great year of innovation in the genetics industry until we meet again in Glasgow at ESHG 2023!