Hesaam Es­fand­yarpour holds what looks like a mi­ni-cool­er up to the com­put­er screen in his Cal­i­for­nia of­fice.

Es­fand­yarpour is in his late-30s, with crows feet creep­ing up against a youth­ful face. He wears a gray po­lo and the de­vice in his hand — with its hard plas­tic-look­ing shell, blue-and-white pat­tern, and a white plas­tic pad­dle re­sem­bling a han­dle jut­ting out the front — might con­tain diced straw­ber­ries and peanut-but­ter sand­wich­es to meet mom and the kids at a So­Cal park. In­stead, Es­fand­yarpour tells me it’s go­ing to change med­i­cine and bio­phar­ma re­search.

Hesaam Es­fand­yarpour

“Med­i­cine is bro­ken com­pared to oth­er tech­nol­o­gy,” he told End­points News. “It means a lot for bio­phar­ma…  it’s go­ing to make a big im­pact on what’s go­ing on with bi­ol­o­gy, both for the pa­tient se­lec­tion and it’s very im­por­tant for clin­i­cal tri­als.”

Es­fand­yarpour is the CEO and founder of Genap­sys, and the de­vice is his long-billed DNA se­quencer. It’s hooked up to the cloud and the white pad­dle ac­tu­al­ly con­tains a slot for a se­quenc­ing chip on which you place the DNA sam­ple.

Speak­ing at con­fer­ences, lec­ture halls, and to Face­book bil­lion­aire Yuri Mil­ner, Es­fand­yarpour has promised for sev­er­al years that the 9.5-pound de­vice will make DNA se­quenc­ing faster and cheap­er — an iPad was his com­mon point of com­par­i­son, al­though the launch prod­uct is larg­er — and thus ush­er med­i­cine in­to the big da­ta era. Now with $90 mil­lion in back­ing from Fore­site Cap­i­tal and oth­ers, that de­vice is hit­ting the mar­ket.

Es­fand­yarpour said di­ag­nos­tic and bio­phar­ma re­search labs have been high­ly in­ter­est­ed in the tech for its ca­pa­bil­i­ty and cost. But Kei­th Ro­bi­son, a com­pu­ta­tion­al bi­ol­o­gist for a Boston-based syn­thet­ic bio com­pa­ny, said that while Genap­sys may find in­ter­est from new biotechs, most sci­en­tists have been trained on Il­lu­mi­na. Com­pa­nies would face huge switch­ing costs.

“Is there a mar­ket for these rel­a­tive­ly small out­put se­quencers?” Ro­bi­son, who al­so runs the blog Omic­sOmics told End­points. “Il­lu­mi­na con­trols 90% of the se­quenc­ing mar­ket over­all, any­one try­ing to get in­to the mar­ket has to fight this gi­ant.”

Es­fand­yarpour’s back­ground is in elec­tri­cal en­gi­neer­ing and he’s been say­ing med­i­cine is bro­ken for some time now, telling Stan­ford stu­dents in 2017 “Steve Jobs claimed to be a prophet, I was in his re­li­gion” and “we can move atoms… but when it comes to med­i­cine we’re still in the cave age.” This area of med­i­cine, though, has been cor­nered and guard­ed for some time. Il­lu­mi­na now counts sales over $3.3 bil­lion per year and a mar­ket cap of $43 bil­lion. With an eye to­ward up­starts such as Nanopore and Ion Tor­rent, they’ve rolled out new prod­ucts such as their No­vaSeq $100 af­ford­able op­tion.

But Es­fand­yarpour says that’s $100 for a ser­vice from a mil­lion-dol­lar ma­chine (and doesn’t re­al­ly cost $100). Genap­sys’s de­vice comes at $9,900 — they mar­ket them­selves as “un­der $10,000” — and is all-in-one. You put the DNA on­to a se­quenc­ing chip made from su­per­con­duc­tors and slip the chip in­to the de­vice. The read­out takes about a day. Ac­cord­ing to Ro­bi­son, it en­ters as the cheap­est se­quencer on the mar­ket.

The ap­pli­ca­tions for cheap, road-trip-cool­er sized ge­nomics are wide and Es­fand­yarpour spoke about teas­ing out new can­cer tar­gets and rapid­ly test­ing pa­tients for clin­i­cal tri­als. Roche’s Foun­da­tion Med­i­cine es­ti­mates that de­spite ad­vance­ments in tar­get­ed on­col­o­gy, on­ly 15% of can­cer pa­tients get ad­vanced DNA se­quenc­ing.

Much of that tech al­ready ex­ists in some form, though, Ro­bi­son said. He thinks ul­ti­mate­ly there is room for Genap­sys to break in, but it will de­pend on how good the ear­ly edi­tions are. He re­called Nanopore get­ting blast­ed on Twit­ter when ear­ly ver­sions of their plat­form gave in­ac­cu­rate read­outs. The tech im­proved but the rep­u­ta­tion stuck.

“The thing prob­a­bly is re­al, but can they re­al­ly ex­e­cute?” Ro­bi­son said. “Does the thing work as it ad­ver­tised? When I get one, does it re­al­ly be­have or is it like an As Seen On TV thing?”

The Phase III might be delayed from its original early July goal, but Moderna says it will still kick off the pivotal study for what could ultimately be the first Covid-19 vaccine before the end of the month.

A day after Reuters reported that squabbling between the Cambridge biotech and government regulators had held up the trial by about two weeks, Moderna released a statement saying that they had completed enrollment of their 650-person Phase II trial and were on track to begin Phase III by the end of the month. The protocol for that study, which is meant to prove whether or not the vaccine can prevent people from becoming sick, has been finalized, they said.

ViiV Healthcare and majority owner GlaxoSmithKline have cleared another important hurdle on a long-running quest to challenge Gilead’s dominance in preventative HIV treatments.

The final analysis of a new study shows the GSK subsidiary’s long-lasting injection, cabotegravir, proved 66% more effective in HIV prevention than Gilead’s breakthrough Truvada pill. And they now intend to carve away some of the blockbuster revenue that Gilead has enjoyed for years.

The pandemic stock market has proven fruitful for virtually any type of biotech. Now a 7-year-old cell therapy startup will see how much it can yield for a company that specializes in fighting viruses.

AlloVir, a company that until 2019 largely lived off grant money, has filed for a $100 million IPO to back its line of off-the-shelf, virus-fighting T cells. Although in normal circumstances, $100 million could be a solid return for a biotech that got its first major round of funding only last year, we’ll have to wait to see how much the company ultimately earns. As Covid-19 has sent investor money scurrying to almost anyone in drug development, every single biotech to go public this year has prized above their midpoint or upsized their offering, according to Renaissance Capital, sometimes dramatically so.