Agilent Partners with PacBio to Speed Adoption of Long Reads into Diagnostic Testing

After more than a decade of success in research, long-read sequencing is more and more adopted into clinical testing. In today’s show, we speak with Rita Shaknovich, Chief Medical Officer at Agilent Technologies, and Sarah Kingan, Associate Director of DNA Applications at Pacific Biosciences (PacBio), about how their collaboration is speeding up this long-anticipated transition.

* 0:00 Long read sequencing changing clinical landscape

* 7:00 Long reads replacing older technologies

* 13:15 Agilent/PacBio partnership – speeding up adoption

* 16:00 Panels designed for short reads can be used for long reads

* 24:25 Democratizing access

Long-read sequencing—once prized mainly by researchers for its ability to resolve structural variants, repeat expansions, and complex genomic regions—has reached a point of technical and economic maturity that now makes it viable in the clinical setting.

“We can now see regions of the genome that were long considered dark matter,” says Shakhnovich. “That’s leading to improved diagnostic yield and, most importantly, better outcomes for patients.”

Agilent brings to this collaboration a long-standing foothold in laboratory testing. Its automated platforms and target enrichment chemistries are already embedded in many diagnostic laboratories worldwide. PacBio, of course, brings the power of HiFi long-read sequencing to the table. Together, the companies are demonstrating that technologies originally designed for short-read sequencing can be seamlessly adapted to long-read workflows.

“Panels that were designed for short reads can be used for long reads—essentially right out of the box,” explains Kingan. “It really just opens up a whole world of clinical applications immediately.”

By combining Agilent’s infrastructure and expertise with PacBio’s long-read innovation, the partnership is accelerating the integration of comprehensive, single-platform sequencing into patient testing. The result is a streamlined, cost-effective approach that reduces the need for multiple assays while providing richer genomic insight.

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