[Histonet] Halloween costume advice for the pathology community

[Michael Farmer]

Esteemed colleagues - 

Every year at this time I am besieged by friends and clients asking my advice on what they should dress up as for Halloween. And every October I tell them that the answer varies from year to year, and the most important question that must be answered first is: Whom do you want to scare?

 If you want to scare Quest or Labcorp, this would be a good year to dress up as Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos. She’s a friendly looking young lass – Google a picture of her and you’ll see – so you wouldn’t think she could scare the Scylla and Charybdis of the lab business. But she’s raised $400m and her board is a dream team of advisors to presidents (Kissinger, Schultz, et al). She’s been working in stealth mode for ten years, and is just now rolling out finger-prick sample collection stations in Walgreen’s drug stores, and transparent pricing that’s half the current CMS rates. Vertically integrated too – they make the instruments, the reagents, and they will control the retail experience as well. 

Last week I was at the American Society of Human Genetics meeting in San Diego, which must have been a downright terrifying event for they guys who get paid to expand the Qiagen, Abbott Molecular, and Roche Molecular PCR and FISH menus.  I counted 37 NGS cancer panels offered by 17 labs, covering anywhere from two (BRCA is so last year) to 1,300 genes. That’s right – 1,300 – that Personalis panel ought to be in the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalogue. And all their prices are headed south, fast. So if you want to scare the assay development teams at Abbot Molecular, Roche Molecular, or Qiagen, you should dress up as an Illumina HiSeq 2500 or an Ion Torrent PGM system.

If you have a soft spot in your heart for the Qiagen, Roche and Abbott folks, and you feel they are being bullied by Illumina and Ion Torrent, get out your Jonathan Rothberg (the fellow who invented next generation sequencing) costume. Or you could just tape his LinkedIn page to your face and go to the party. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanrothberg. This costume will also work if you want to scare the guys at Bio-Rad who just bought GnuBio. It will also scare Pacific BioSciences shareholders who are feeling giddy about their most recent quarter. Whatever you do, don’t wear this costume around the CEO or CFO of Thermo. Have fun at the Halloween party but at the same time, be merciful and don’t induce any heart attacks.

If you want to scare the M&A team at Ventana, Dako, or Leica, you may want to rent a Whole Slide Imaging scanner costume. After the ASHG in San Diego I stopped by the Pathology Visions meeting in San Francisco. The annual digital pathology party I’ve been going to for five years has turned into a wake. You can bet somebody in Basel is rubbing his neck and saying to himself: “Damn – I sure could have used that $100m for something that would have driven revenues.” The Leica M&A guys are crying in their beer over $150m. Over at Agilent, they’re breathing a sigh of relief that they managed to dodge that bullet.

I really do feel that it is heartless and cruel to pick on innocent, underpaid, exploited histotechs, but if you’re looking for a bunch of people who scare easily, dress up as a Sakura SmartSection or a Kurabo AS-400. I saw these behemoths for the first time in Yokohama this summer at the Japanese annual pathology meeting. These costumes will work for scaring Thermo and Leica core histology product development types as well, but in their complacency they may just roll their eyes and say “I’ll wait and let that scare me in a couple of years.” Both these instruments are trying to turn embedded tissue into slides, while turning histotechs into burger-flippers. 

Check in with me next year at this time and I’ll let you know which costumes are hot.

Michael Farmer

McEvoy & Farmer Pathology

415-994-8852

michael <@t> mcevoyandfarmer.com

Those who seek the truth doubt those who find it.

- André Gide