Halcyon Molecular


Halcyon Molecular was a whole genome sequencing startup based in Redwood City, California, founded in 2008, that went out of business in 2012.

History

Halcyon was founded by the brothers William Andregg and Michael Andregg in 2008, and was based, first at the University of Arizona where they had done undergraduate coursework, and later in Redwood City, California. It raised over $20 million in venture capital investment from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, as well as hardware entrepreneur Elon Musk. Over the period 2010-2011, the company employed former SpaceX computer engineers Michael Dabrowski and Paul Dabrowski, and relatedly Alex Pesch, before they left to found Synthego.

Products

According to Luke Nosek, Halcyon aimed to develop technology that could "sequence 100 percent complete human genome in less than ten minutes for less tha $100". Mike Hodgkinson of The Independent described their aim as "hugely ambitious". They faced competition from Oxford Nanopore Technologies, who had developed their own genetic sequencing system.
As of July 2013, the core technology upon which their new sequencing paradigm had been based had been published in collaboration with the laboratory of George M. Church at Harvard University, where it was described as "olecular threading," which "show great potential as a high-throughput DNA manipulation technology," but noting that "much work s needed before it can be reliably applied in scaled DNA sequencing...".