MENLO PARK, Calif. — Pacific Biosciences, a private company developing a disruptive technology platform for real-time detection of biological events at single molecule resolution, announced today that Evan Eichler, Ph.D. has joined its Scientific Advisory Board.

Dr. Eichler is currently Professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle. The long-term goal of his research is to understand the evolution, pathology, and mechanisms of recent gene duplication and DNA transposition within the human genome. Dr. Eichler graduated with a B.Sc. Honors degree in Biology from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada in 1990 and received his Ph.D. in 1995 from the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston.

“I am excited about Pacific Biosciences’ third-generation sequencing technology because it has the potential of addressing the dark matter of the genome – areas that include gene families with copy number variation associated with disease but whose structures are fundamentally inaccessible to second-generation technologies,” said Dr. Eichler. “Long-molecule sequence reads are the key to resolving these dynamic regions of our genome.”

Rare genetic variants, structural rearrangements in the genome, and other sources of variation such as differentially methylated DNA sites have recently been discovered to play a larger role in explaining disease risk and progression. Pacific Biosciences is developing a third-generation technology platform called the SMRT (single molecule real time) system that will allow a more comprehensive characterization of a greater variety of variation types with the potential to generate far more clinically useful models of disease.

“Evan is a renowned scientist who played a key role in solving some of the toughest challenges in the Human Genome Project and is today applying his expertise in structural variation to cutting edge evolutionary biology and clinical studies,” said Eric Schadt, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer of Pacific Biosciences. “We look forward to working together to develop new applications for our SMRT technology to address complex sources of genetic variation.”

More information is available at www.pacificbiosciences.com

About Pacific Biosciences

Pacific Biosciences’ mission is to transform the way humankind acquires, processes and interprets data from living systems. The company has developed a disruptive technology platform for the real-time detection of biological events at single molecule resolution. Single Molecule Real Time (SMRT™) Biology promises to revolutionize the life sciences by revealing the underlying networks that define living systems. The first application for the SMRT Biology platform is a paradigm changing approach to DNA sequencing. The SMRT Sequencing System will ultimately make it possible to sequence individual genomes as part of routine medical care. DNA sequencing is expected to be the first of many transformative SMRT Biology applications that will benefit society by driving radical advances in fields such as personalized medicine, agriculture, clean energy, and global health.