future of CyTOF
This post is of a subject that may generate a little bit of controversy. However, science is full of controversy, so I feel as if it is best to address it head on. Its a bit of an "elephant in the room." Moderators, if this is out of scope with what should be posted here, feel free to remove, I won't take it personally
I should preface to say I love the CyTOF technology and have poured blood, sweat, and tears into using and furthering the technology - and will continue to do so for as long as my career allows me.
It seems like recently more and more, CyTOF has come under fire from many angles. It has come under fire from the high-parameter flow arena, which touts that flow is more high throughput and commercially available to support high parameter protein detection (but its still fluorescence based, where naturally occurring fluorescence could complicate panel development). It has come under fire from the oligo-conjugated sequencing antibody side, where it is touted that up to 300 targets can be detected at one time, and used in tandem with rna-sequencing to get genomics and proteomics in one package (however intracellular targets are a challenge, but ASAP Seq seems to be an approach addressing this). Multi-omic platforms that integrate all of these approaches into one single stream are being feverishly developed and poised to hit the market maybe next year or so.
These technologies do not have to be diametrically opposed to each other, but sometimes at least from a vendor side, it is conveyed that they rival CyTOF (various conversations I've had with other vendors try to outcompete CyTOF in their pitches). Some pitches have felt almost predatory in trying to get an advantage over CyTOF. I feel that these technologies can work with each other, but sometimes commercial interests make that a bit harder to actually come true. It begs the question, what is going to give?
What I'd like to hear from everyone is:
-What do you think the future of CyTOF is? Is there enough left to develop in order to keep this technology going for the very long term?
-How do you think that CyTOF can be used in conjunction with technologies like spectral flow and CITESeq (rather than opposed to them)?
-When challenged, how do you defend the validity of CyTOF? I'd love to borrow from others wisdom and experience here, as learning to defend it better is definitely a strong interest of mine).
Hopefully I don't ignite too much here, other than productive discussion and a 360 view of where CyTOF is and where it is going. I look forward to hearing all of your experiences and opinions.
Regards,
Greg Hopkins (ghopkins@bluebirdbio.com)