Five years later, Lapidus’ company had built a prototype “DNA microscope” and set course to take on the market leader, Illumina. But the Heliscope was a monstrous slab of hardware—some customers had to reinforce their lab floors to accommodate the instrument—with an equally hefty $1 million price tag to match. Worse, there were chemistry glitches that compromised accuracy. Helicos went public in 2007 but that too was a miscalculation. “We were trying to IPO with no revenue. We got killed!” recalls Steve Lombardi, who succeeded Lapidus as CEO.11 By the time JK arrived at Stanford, Helicos was delisted from Nasdaq and shedding staff—a rare defeat for Quake.
Another Quake innovation would have a direct bearing on JK’s future path. In 2008, graduate student Christina Fan led an NGS study to survey the cell-free (cf) DNA in maternal blood to measure the relative contribution of each chromosome. By literally sampling millions of free-floating DNA fragments, she could diagnose cases of trisomy 21 (Down syndrome) and other chromosomal disorders or aneuploidies.12 This breakthrough—similar results were reported by Dennis Lo and colleagues in Hong Kong—gave birth to the technology of NIPT. Quake’s spin-out, Verinata Health, was later acquired by Illumina.
JK spent twelve months in the Quake lab, working mostly as a computational biologist, publishing a paper on the sequence analysis of genes in the immune system.13 But he didn’t have to wait long before he landed a golden opportunity to return to his homeland. In late 2011, JK met Zhu Qingshi, the former president of USTC, during a recruiting trip. Zhu had been named founding president of an ambitious new private university in Shenzhen modeled on Stanford—the Southern University of Science and Technology, or SUSTech.
JK returned home on the wings of the Peacock Plan, a multimillion-dollar program to attract outstanding talent to Shenzhen. (The name comes from an old Chinese proverb, “The peacocks fly to the southeast.”) JK announced the “He Jiankui and Michael Deem Joint Laboratory” on his blog before he’d even left Stanford, along with the SUSTech Gene Sequencing Center, which would feature “a world-class next-generation DNA sequencing platform.”
The location of SUSTech in Shenzhen, neighboring Hong Kong, was significant. Just twenty-five years earlier, Shenzhen had been little more than a fishing village. In 1980, the Chinese government declared Shenzhen an economic prosperity zone. The subsequent expansion has been astonishing: today, Shenzhen is a sprawling city of 20 million people, dominated by high-tech, manufacturing, and China’s largest genomics company, BGI (formerly the Beijing Genomics Institute).
BGI was officially born in September 1999—or more precisely, at “9 seconds past 9 minutes past the 9th hour of the 9th day of the 9th month of the 99th year of that century,” as the founding chairman Yang Huanming told me several years ago.14 We met following a party at Boston’s famous tourist spot—the Cheers pub—to mark the opening of BGI’s operations in the United States. The cultural entertainment included a sand painter, artfully sculpting pictures in sand on an overhead projector, charting the course of history from the big bang to the birth of BGI. The institute had grown from a bit player in the international Human Genome Project supplying about 1 percent of the total genome sequence, to one of the world’s genomics powerhouses. BGI deciphered the rice genome in 2002 and six years later published the genome sequence of the first Asian person, an anonymous individual named “Y.H.” (“If someone says it’s me, it’s a rumor,” Yang smiled.)
Under the leadership of Yang, president and cofounder Wang Jian, and a talented young bioinformatician, Wang Jun, in 2011 BGI bought a fleet of 130 Illumina NGS instruments to establish the world’s largest genome sequencing center in Hong Kong.15 BGI compiled a “genomic zoo” of plant genomes, including rice, cucumber and soybean, and animals, including the honey bee, silkworm, and of course, China’s beloved giant panda.16 The secret to BGI’s success—apart from quality, speed, and price—was scale. “We must be the biggest,” Yang said.
In 2013, BGI became the first Chinese organization to buy an American public company when it acquired Complete Genomics, a San Francisco–based company with its own NGS technology, which now features in a new spin-off. This company, MGI, has released its own benchtop sequencer that has quickly attained a domestic market share approaching 50 percent, and in 2020 announced it had reached the “$100 genome.”17
In addition to pushing into the clinical market, BGI embarked on a Cognitive Genomics project, in collaboration with Michigan State physicist Stephen Hsu, to investigate the genetics of cognition and intelligence. The controversial project has since been shelved, but it epitomizes Wang Jian’s attitude to the genetics market. In the West, “you have a certain way,” Wang said. “You feel you are advanced and you are the best. Blah, blah, blah.” Wang has no interest in following the fussy rules and regulations decreed by American institutes and think tanks. “You need somebody to change it, to blow it up,” Wang said. “For the last five hundred years, you’ve been leading the way with innovation. We are no longer interested in following.”18
That spirit and resolve was infectious. Whether studying the genetic basis of intelligence or running experimental clinical trials or editing human embryos, Chinese scientists were determined to push the envelope, with little concern for the cultural, ethical, or regulatory strictures that might govern such endeavors in the West.
With BGI dominating the genomics landscape in China, Shenzhen was a dynamic location for an ambitious young researcher looking to make his mark both in academia and business. JK was lavished with millions of dollars’ worth of government funding—$5 million in 2016 alone.19 “Shenzhen has transformed itself from labor-intensive industry to high tech,” JK told my former colleagues at Bio-IT World in 2015. “The government has ambitions. They’re trying to switch from ‘Made in China’ to ‘Invented in China.’ ”20
Part of that reinvention was to retool the dormant Helicos sequencing technology following the company’s demise in 2012. While a Boston company called SeqLL bought up Helicos’s hardware in a fire sale, JK licensed Quake’s intellectual property to build a new company. Following in BGI’s footsteps, he aimed to release a domestic DNA sequencer deployed in Chinese hospitals addressing domestic health problems, servicing the largest population in the world.
To assist with the company’s launch, JK contacted HDMZ, an American PR company that had produced a magazine article on sequencing technology for Nature. The company’s director of science communications, Ryan Ferrell, flew to Shenzhen in 2015. JK’s preferred name for the company was Public Genomics, which signaled its aim to serve the Chinese people. But the leadership team voted for Direct Genomics, or Hanhai in Chinese. “We’re a new generation of entrepreneurs,” JK said. “We’ve had great discussions with the Chinese FDA… They really hope our Chinese brand could be used in hospitals.”21
JK invited Deem, his PhD mentor, to become a scientific advisor. He redesigned the Helicos platform so that the target enrichment for a simple diagnostic test could occur on the same flow cell that performed the DNA sequencing. With improved optics, lenses, and cameras, his company shrank the sequencer from the size of an industrial fridge to a portable dehumidifier, and named it the GenoCare analyzer.
In December 2015, JK posted a photo on WeChat, the ubiquitous Chinese social media platform, taken next to prototype instruments alongside Deem and Quake, everyone wearing lab coats and disposable booties. He also persuaded Helicos’s former chief science officer, Bill Efcavitch, to join the advisory board. JK and Deem traveled across China surveying the exploding clinical market. The GenoCare still suffered some limitations, but in specific applications such as searching for cancer gene mutations or hepatitis, JK was confident the technology would suffice. Others were skepticaclass="underline" “The company is just dodging GenoCare’s faults as a sequencer by picking clinical targets where its flaws are irrelevant,” Bio-IT World concluded.22