TwinStrand Lawsuits and Singular Layoffs

It’s been a busy day in sequencing related Biotech!

Twinstrand/Guardant

Twinstrand won a lawsuit against Guardant! I previously wrote about this, and speculated that Twinstrand’s formation might have in part been motivated/supported by Guardant’s success using what seems like a very similar approach. TwinStrand won damages of $83.4M… there will be appeals of course. But long term will Guardant be forced to license the technology from TwinStrand? TwinStrand laid off 50% of their workforce not long ago. Guardant also laid off 7% recently. But this seems like it should be good news for TwinStrand perhaps they’ll re-focus on technology licensing… or will be acquired.

Singular Call/Lay offs

The Singular Genomics slow motion train wreck continues. The full transcript of their earnings call is available here.

They shipped 5 instruments in Q3. Sounds like one of them went to the Broad. But this is pretty insignificant compared to Element who just installed their 100th instrument (Singular have shipped 16 total). One customer is using a reasonable amount of sequencing however:

“In fact, one of our earliest customer placements has ramped their utilization over the last nine months to an expected annualized pull-through rate of approximately $170,000.”

They also laid off 10% of their staff. They believe these actions will extend our cash runway into early 2026. And they still have a decent amount of cash in the bank: Net loss for the third quarter of 2023 was $22.4 million… Ending cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments, excluding restricted cash, totaled $190.7 million.