Everything Wrong With: "Illumina: The Measurement Monopoly" Part 3/8
Century of Biology still has 10x the subscriptions I do… let’s continue to examine one the the articles posted there as part of this cathartic process which will continue until at least another 10,000 of you subscribe (it’s free, you don’t really need to pay unless you want get more articles and access to the archive, honest!).
This time let’s skip forward a bit to this sentence:
“Illumina invented a profound new measurement technology and paired their innovation with a business strategy that enabled them to capture enduring differential returns over time.”
Illumina Didn’t Invent Anything!
Oh dear! Oh no… no! Illumina didn't invent s**t1. They bought it2.
They bought it from a UK company called Solexa. Illumina’s original Next-gen sequencer (The Genome Analyzer) was entirely developed by Solexa prior to the acquisition. Illumina just changed the branding and started pushing them out the door:
Solexa themselves acquired a key part of the sequencing approach3 from a small company called Manteia Predictive Medicine, they probably paid about $1.5M for it, which considering that Solexa sold for $600M4 seems like a bargain.
Business Strategy
Why did Illumina originally buy Solexa?
At least one rational I’ve seen quoted elsewhere is the idea that sequencing would be a discovery platform for microarrays. The idea is that sequencers would help identify more (and more useful) SNPs, which would help Illumina create more interesting Microarrays.
It seems unlikely that Illumina were aware that sequencing would become almost the totality of their business5. However when that became clear they went with it, and very successfully iterated over the fundamental innovations acquired with Solexa.
Enduring Differential Returns Over Time
What’s a differential return? It seems to be some kind of metric that factors in risk. In any case, Illumina have made a lot of money. Recently Illumina have got fed up the strategy of being endlessly profitable and seem to be doing their best to destroy the company6.
The Rewrite
“Solexa invented a profound new measurement technology. They sold it to Illumina, who discovered people liked sequencing things and made a lot of money!”
In the context of a new measurement technology (NGS). They invented lots of interesting approaches after the development of the basic sequencing approach.
I mean he must know this, he talks about it later. But putting this front and center still kind of sucks in my opinion. Solexa/Manteia predictive medicine had a long and arduous journey.
Bridge amplification
And it formed the basis of all Illumina’s sequencing profits going forward.
Over on the Discord some have disputed this. I suspect there were probably a good number of people at Illumina who knew that long term sequencing was the future.
This is complicated and it’s not 100% exactly what Illumina should be doing. But it is clear that what they have done has created a huge mess.
Some component of the hardware came in through Lynx - though it’s important is not clear - you get different stories talking to Lynx alums vs. Illumina alums