Dante Labs was doing so well right up until the pandemic shut down the world. Understandably, being located in Italy which had a large flare up, their lab had limited services in March and April. But then, once things started opening back up there, the service became erratic like in the past. The message boards are full of posts of non-delivery of new results, promised updates to old results, and refusals to cancel orders over a year old with no delivery yet given. During this time they started repositioning themselves on their website as a Covid19 testing laboratory. Finally, in June, some scant initial posts that the library prep chemicals needed to do sequencing had run out and replenishment from Illumina and the USA was not forthcoming. Likely being redirected to certain types of Covid19 tests. As the complaints pile-up, then today hit.

Without any notice, all access to BAM and FASTQ files stopped working. Errors given contained URL's that indicate all the large files have been moved to the AWS GLACIER offline storage service. A special service where access to data can be delayed by hours to days once a request is made. Notes from Dante Labs customer support (a first within the same 24 hour period of similar moves) indicates that they are instituting a new policy where data older than 90 days will be archived in off-line storage. To retain active access like before, users would have to pay a subscription — yet to be setup and determined. Wait, what? No warning. No 'nutin! An everyone's data taken down. Even if not yet 90 days old.

Now this does not surprise us. As we know online, instant access to large data files like the BAMs and FASTQs is not cheap. James Kane claims $3/mth per user (for 100GB). Some users have been online for almost two years with their test data. We suspect Nebula and any company providing these large WGS data files will likely be doing something similar soon. It is not sustainable as the client base grows to keep the data instantly accessible. Even the old stalwart GEDMatch do not keep the submitted RAW microarray file format file online once processed into their database. And those are only 30-40 MB.

The other guess-we-should-expect-it is the lack of communication and customer support from the company. They continue to simply shoot themselves in the foot and we often wonder what their business plan really is because it is not clear from their execution. And so the market turns. Given the number of Dante's customers who are sold on the health interpretation and they turn to them out of desperation due to lack of access to proper diagnosis for rare and odd symptoms, this is simply throwing kerosene on the already large flames of their burning reputation it seems. And here we thought they had turned a corner for the better late last year.

We should add that the complaints have been rising significantly again, in general, against Dante Labs. They were doing so well and given 2-8 week turnarounds on WGS tests. But then the pandemic hit and shut their country (and the World) down. As they came out of that, the focus seems to be on Covid19 testing. First in Spring they ran out of library prep chemicals (from Illumina). Then it appears this summer out of flow cells all together. Illumina's demand for use of these products in sequencers that are applied to Covid testing is large. (Surprising since a WGS test for Covid19 seems overkill.) So we will have to see how they recover from this latest hiccup. Are they to remain a serious test source? Meanwhile Nebula Genomics continues to deliver on their newly provided WGS entry.