AGBT Sponsorship Statistics 2024
The AGBT meeting is almost here and that means it is time for me to do an analysis of the sponsorship of the meeting. With AGBT being the premier genomics conference of the year, companies use it as a way to connect with their customers. However, the costs of AGBT sponsorship are extremely high and can easily eat up a large part of the marketing budget for a smaller company. In particular, a company like PacBio might want to lower their sponsorship level in order to spend money on a singer like Flo-Rida, Mackelmore or Maroon Five. (Incidentally, I wonder about the ROI of the musical performances for PacBio) While the levels of sponsorship are tiered based upon cost, there is a complex and opaque auction system to determine the winners.
The highest level of sponsorship for the meeting Gold and this position has been filled by many different companies over the years. For some companies, it is their way of making a big splashy launch, but unfortunately, many of these companies have not had financial success.
Twist was the top sponsor for 2018 and 2019 and they remain a strong force in Genomics. Nanostring went for the top spot twice in 2021 and 2023, when they were doing well. Unfortunately, they have been having financial difficulties recently, which are a large extend due to 10X litigation. Resolve made a big splash with their launch in 2022 as a spatial transcriptomics platform. They failed to become a market leader, and they seem to have retreated. After sponsoring at the Silver level in 2023, they are not involved in the conference this year. This year, Ultima is taking the top spot as they are officially launching their machine with very low cost high throughput sequencing. We will see if Ultima succeeds and becomes a leader in the field, or if they become another startup that dremed big. Ultima is the only company that is hoping to compete with Illumina and their high-throughput NovaSeq X machines. Other smaller companies such as Singular and Element are only competing at the lower throughput NextSeq level.
The sponsorship levels of Illumina through the years give an interesting picture of the company and their positioning in the industry. For at least the past decade, Illumina has been the undisputed leader of genomics. The vast majority or work presented at AGBT was based upon Illumina sequencing. All of the new tool companies were developed specifically to provide input DNA to an Illumina sequencer. For example, the 10X Genomics Chromium is a tool primarily for looking at single cell RNA expression. It can be characterized as basically a fancy sample prep machine for Illumina sequencing.
Illumina has never been a Gold sponsor, and they were content to attend at a lower level. Due to their size, Illumina had the biggest marketing budget and could easily have handled the top sponsorship. Interestingly, they went so far as to not officially sponsor the meeting in 2022.
Another interesting sponsor this year is Oxford Nanopore. After launching their MinIon at AGBT in 2012, they have avoided the meeting. Employees have been at AGBT and have presented posters, but the company was not an official sponsor. This year, they are joining as a low level Contributing sponsor. Several years ago, the CEO Gordon Saghera told me that Oxford Nanopore avoids AGBT since it is "An Illumina love fest".
It is also interesting this year that there are many new startups I have not heard of that are sponsoring the meeting. These include Dxome, Moleculent, DeepCell and N6. The N6 website is totally blank except for a reminder to attend their AGBT workshop. They say that their new solution "will revolutionize NGS sample prep workflow universally across virtually all assays." It remains to be seen if this is an overreach.
As always, it looks like there will be a great meeting this year. Unfortunately it will be in Orlando rather than Marco Island. We will miss the beach. Come say hello to me at the meeting or drop me a line if you would like to chat further. Also, stay tuned for my analysis of the abstracts coming out in a few days.
For the full dataset of sponsorship going back to 2016, look here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSeBtihug-687b0-wyuTChiX1Qoi6Ik5--qKtSx62eMWvkpjszsCYflxbJXoWPrKBF4f4kV4PeY96Kz/pubhtml
Genomics and Biomarkers Leader
1 个月Check out my updated 2025 analysis: https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/jeffrosenfeld_my-annual-analysis-of-sponsorship-of-agbt-activity-7290756272692330496-tgVV?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
Global biotech CXO leveraging and improving business operations through data science, analytics, machine learning, and AI to fuel and accelerate innovation
1 å¹´How about factoring in the cost of sponsorship for each year - unless that level of $$ has stayed constant across the years. At some point the ask for sponsorship is higher than the willingness to pay and may not necessarily be a sign of the 'financial health of the people sponsoring' but in fact due to the fees. However, I understand this information is likely not available...
Chief Executive Officer at Tremendis Corp
1 å¹´Thank-you for this. Although the article stated Ultima is the only competitor to illumina's high throughput offering, we should remember the Complete Genomics already does this with very good data. Complete also has a better overall cost compared to illumina. The fact that Complete won that spectacular lawsuit judgement should also bolter their success globally.
Director @ UC Berkeley- QB3 Genomics; Sequencing and Operations
1 å¹´I'd love to see this go back to 2015 or beyond
Building meaningful connections through events
1 å¹´With more conferences available than ever, the tech providers have more choice and routes to ROI. I'd be interested to know what ROI (or ROO) the vendors hope to gain from the event vs what they actually get. And if they're even measuring it. I think it's fine to pay an extortionate amount if you're putting pressure on the organisers to deliver exceptional value, however you want to define it.