Comments On "An Illumina Sequencer in 2000"

A couple of weeks back I wrote an article speculating that with the right financial incentives we could have had an Illumina style sequencing platform in the year 2000 (or perhaps earlier) and suggesting that broader dynamics ended up pulling the Solexa (now Illumina) sequencing technology toward the US.

Well, two people very close to the action commented on LinkedIn. Namely Nick McCooke (Solexa CEO) and Pascal Mayer (Manteia CSO).

It was interesting to see these two contrasting viewpoints, and I thought they would be interesting to a wider audience, so here they are!

Firstly a missing part of the story from Nick McCooke:

Originally Serono wanted to sell the company but there was no way we could take on a Swiss company (not enough cash or management reach - we were tiny), so I had to walk away. The Swiss lawyer I was using overheard a Serono conversation saying that they would put the company into administration if they couldn’t get a buyer, so he said to me he would let me know if this appeared in the relevant gazette (because then he thought we could bid for the technology alone). It was hard to walk away but a few months later he called me to say it was in the gazette and thought we could revisit negotiations to acquire the technology.

The thought that such a fundamentally important technology was almost left on the table is jarring. Not really the fault of any of the players involved… but perhaps indicates a lack of insight from other potential investors.

Nick also gave some insight into the final deal terms:

I know Solexa paid cash and Lynx an equivalent amount in Lynx stock (so 50:50 split). I guessing it was about £2M each. That sort of order of magnitude. So in retrospect, a bargain. But you have to remember at the time there was no such thing as NGS, just a few people with some imaginative ideas! Solexa had received about £16M in funding by that time. Nowhere near the huge amounts of funds raised by the new NGS wave.

This is more or less in line with what I was able to glean from company filings, but I didn’t know about the stock component!

Pascal Mayer also commented from his prespective:

In 2003, Serono’s CEO and billionaire main shareholder Ernesto Bertarelli was taking a leave to go and win the America’s Cup (impressive, congratulations, nothing from me to criticize). He left interim management to lawyers and a new CFO (don’t remember his name). I heard (then and later) that that CFO decided to cost-cut severely: Manteia was the first in line, and 4 additional spin-off projects were buried alive, despite in the starting blocks. Our CEO, Francisco ‘Paco’ Rubio Sandi, former VP of marketing of Serono, known to have been highly instrumental in the impressive financial success of Serono, was unsuccessful in getting Ernesto Bertarelli to influence on this.

Just before, in 2002(?), Serono had bought French by then genetics flagship GenSet, notably with famous and influent geneticist Daniel Cohen. For 100 millions Euros. Serono was a cash rich company. We got, apparently, to the least, little support from them: “Manteia? great tech, will work in ten years”. Thanks guys.

Especially with VP of Business Development (or alike VP) Leon Bushara, the Manteia management was pushing to merge Manteia, Solexa and Lynx (I think even before Solexa could get its 2003(?) refinancing): each of us had bits and pieces of patents and technology and each was struggling up to extenuation to find alternatives to these bits and pieces. As Nick, myself and the rest of our team was convinced that putting all of it together would make next-day an operational technology, with a great team, and a listed company for fund raising  and exit. Seono was overflowing with cash, could have financed the merged NewCo for a couple of years more without noticing, and bingo for everybody.

Nick told the rest of the story: Serono’s “visionary” CFO and lawyers decided to sell the Manteia, and as Solexa could not buy, to shut down Manteia (laying all the staff off, abruptly and fiercely) and put the technology and (sequencing!) instruments to an auction, announced in the “Lega Gazette”. Even my and Paco’s efforts to relocate Manteia somewhere in EU had been aborted authoritatively and abruptly by the Serono CFO/lawyers (Paco in Spain, me in France with former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, by then Président of Région Auvergne being ready to provide us with substantial EU financing). I just didn’t know that they thought about the Gazette that early in 2003…

Mayer also posted some of Manteia’s sequencing results (I think these are the same slides I’ve seen elsewhere).

Circling back to Nick McCooke’s comment, he pushed back on my suggestion that the Illumina acquisition resulted in greater access to capital:

it’s frequently misunderstood: Solexa became a US NASDAQ-listed company, with access to US funding, BEFORE it was acquired by Illumina (via its reverse takeover of Lynx Therapeutics). Second, I was responsible for the acquisition of Manteia. Money was tight all round, not just at Manteia! Believing in the possibility of a radical new way of sequencing was very much a minority sport back then, so I don’t think anything could have happened much faster . Shortage of cash was why, with Kevin Corcoran at Lynx, we combined to buy the Manteia technology jointly, to avoid bidding against each other, Solexa paying with its limited cash, and Lynx with its much devalued stock. The Manteia cluster technology worked brilliantly well but they were not very far with chemistry (whatever Pascal says). Solexa had the chemistry but we were beating our heads against the wall trying to get single molecule templates to work. The combination of the two was, as we all now know, a winner!!

You can read the whole thread over on LinkedIn!

Their comments added a lot of interesting context for me.

There is however a missing piece of the puzzle. If as Nick says the combined Solexa-Lynx entity had ample access to US capital why did they end up being acquired by Illumina?

For that we’d need to a comment from the CEO who took over after Nick: John West.

So if you’re out there John! Feel free to leave a comment or ping me (new@sgenomics.org).

And everyone else: You should subscribe for future updates!