Roche is bringing its newest gene sequencing platform to researchers across Asia Pacific, stepping up its push into one of the world's fastest-growing markets for genomic science.

The Swiss healthcare company said it would showcase AXELIOS 1, its next-generation sequencing system, to laboratory leaders and researchers through a series of events in Sydney and Seoul this November, following the platform's global launch in June 2026.

The Sydney sessions take place on 9 and 10 November, with Seoul following on 12 and 13 November. The events, called AXELIOS Days, will feature scientific discussions and live demonstrations of the platform, giving researchers in Australia and South Korea a first close look at the technology.

At the heart of AXELIOS 1 is a technique Roche calls sequencing by expansion, or SBX. It converts genetic information into synthetic molecules known as Xpandomers, which are around 50 times longer than the original DNA fragments. Because the stretched-out molecules are easier to read individually, Roche says the approach supports high-accuracy sequencing.

Speed is the platform's other selling point. Roche says sequencing runs take from around 15 minutes to four hours, generating at least 1.8 terabases of data in a four-hour run, with the potential to deliver whole-genome results within the same day. For laboratories, that could mean faster answers for time-sensitive research and less waiting to gather enough samples to fill a run.

South Korea has been an early adopter. Macrogen, a Korean genomics company, has begun operating AXELIOS 1 at its Songdo Global Genome Center in Incheon, aiming to speed up whole-genome sequencing and expand capacity for large-scale studies. Its chief executive, Changhoon Kim, said the company saw in the platform an opportunity to take on projects that might previously have been difficult to pursue.

Lim Hong Yew, Roche Diagnostics' APAC value stream lead, said laboratories had for too long been forced to trade off speed, accuracy, scale and cost. He said AXELIOS 1 gave researchers greater flexibility to pursue studies that had been challenging to undertake, and that Roche's ambition was to help laboratories across the region build on growing genomics capabilities.

The Australian Genome Research Facility is also watching the technology closely. Its chief scientific officer, Cath Moore, said the platform offered a different combination of speed, scalability, flexibility and read length, and that it could help Australian researchers pursue important questions more effectively.

The push comes as demand for sequencing grows sharply across the region. Roche cited market research projecting that the Asia Pacific next-generation sequencing market would more than double, from 3.4 billion US dollars in 2025 to 7.38 billion dollars by 2030, as researchers tackle complex diseases and study the genetic diversity of regional populations.

Roche stresses that AXELIOS 1 is for research use only and is not for use in diagnostic procedures. The company is also offering library preparation kits and a free open-source bioinformatics analysis suite designed for the SBX technology.

Since the SBX chemistry was unveiled in early 2025, researchers have tested it across whole-genome sequencing, RNA sequencing, single-cell RNA work and methylation studies. Early users have also applied it in oncology, genetics and infectious disease research, and the technology has been credited with a world record for the fastest DNA sequencing technique.

Whether the platform can challenge the established leaders in sequencing remains to be seen, but Roche's events in Sydney and Seoul will be the first test of how the region's research community responds to its newest machine.