In a Relatively Quiet Year for NGS, Roche Made Noise
The Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) field has a high bar for buzz-generating news. Over the past few years, the space has seen several new companies launch. The community spent most of 2022 parsing through a near-constant flurry of announcements; there were endless questions to be asked and answered about new products, trying to define read lengths, throughput, accuracy, and cost. Now, several years—and new instruments—later, the market does not have much room for new entrants. As a result, hot news is hard to come by and the community is less easily excited.
But Roche broke through that lull ten months ago when the company announced a new NGS technology at the AGBT meeting in February (a conference notorious for product launches.) Days before the meeting, the company hosted a webinar to introduce their sequencing expansion technology (SBX). The future sequencing instrument will be a merging of two companies that Roche had previously acquired—Stratos Genomics and Genia Technologies.
The chemistry is incredibly unique. SBX produces an Xpandomer—a surrogate molecule roughly 50 times longer than the target DNA—and stores the sequence information in large, high-signal-to-noise reporters. The Xpandomer is built from X-NTPs linked to a DNA template so that the DNA sequence is reflected in the X-NTP sequence. As the template is degraded, the chain expands into an Xpandomer, which is then passed through a nanopore. This is executed across millions of CMOS-sensor wells.
"The expandomer approach is genuinely innovative—a clever way to bypass fundamental limitations of direct nanopore sequencing. If Roche can deliver on the promise of integrated multiomics with the speed they've demonstrated, it could reshape all types of molecular profiling. That said, the real test will be whether the technology scales reliably across diverse sample types and whether the cost-per-sample economics work for both research and clinical applications. It's an exciting time for the field and having multiple competing technologies pushing the boundaries will benefit the entire genomics community." - Christoph Ziegenhain
The Roche news sparked a new wave of interest while leaving many questions unanswered. Six months later, at the ASHG meeting in Boston in October, Roche released a new wave of information, including the name of the platform—Axelios. More importantly, Mark Kokoris, Head of SBX Technology at Roche and co-inventor of the expandomer technology, presented new data providing evidence that the SBX technology is fast (a team from Roche, Broad Clinical Labs, and Boston Children’s Hospital broke the Guinness World, completing a human whole genome in under four hours) and flexible.
They also emphasized SBX´ multiomics capabilities: a longer-read workflow that enables isoform detection and how SBX-Duplex combined with methylation mapping can advance certain applications like liquid biopsy–based cancer detection and the discovery of novel epigenetic biomarkers. Roche also revealed the cost of the AXELIOS: $750,000 for the instrument (the cost of consumables remains unknown.)
The information presented at ASHG continued the buzz through the fourth quarter of 2025 while whetting the palates of NGS aficionados heading into 2026. The most pressing question now is the launch date. Many anticipate the announcement at AGBT, noting the meeting’s reputation for big news and the maturity of the data shown at ASHG.
“Roche didn’t just surprise the market with the launch of a new sequencing platform — with Sequencing by Expansion they also introduced a new generation of sequencing chemistry. The speed and versatility of these assays have the potential to disrupt the market, and both established and emerging players will be watching their market positions very closely as we move toward 2026.” - Holger Heyn
What will commercial availability of the AXELIOS mean for the rest of the field? It will likely put pressure on Illumina, the industry leader, which has recently expanded its multiomics capabilities in spatial, proteomics, and single-cell. And how will it impact newer entrants like Element—a company that has been moving into precision medicine, including recent news of collaborations with Sophia Genetics and an agreement with Revvity to commercialize an in vitro diagnostic (IVD) workflow solution for neonatal sequencing. In addition, Ultima is expanding the reach of its UG-100 platform through global partnerships including collaborating with NeoGenomics on cancer diagnostics and the selection of the UG-100 for major population-scale and proteomics initiatives, including the UK Biobank’s large-scale proteome study.
Indeed, all of the NGS companies—Singular (which has pivoted to spatial recently), PacBio, Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT), MGI, etc, will be watching carefully. As will their users.
Many factors will determine the future success of the Axelios, and some go beyond the instrument’s capabilities. Users also choose NGS instruments based on factors such as company reliability and service quality, and Roche has a complex history in the NGS space. Although established NGS companies may not welcome Axelios’ entry into the market, Roche has kept the excitement going and given us a real story to look forward to in 2026.