History
Illumina was founded in April 1998 by David Walt, Ph.D., Larry Bock, John Stuelpnagel, D.V.M., Anthony Czarnik, Ph.D., and Mark Chee, Ph.D. While working with CW Group, a venture capital firm, Larry and John uncovered what would become Illumina's BeadArray technology at Tufts University and negotiated an exclusive license to that technology. Illumina completed its initial public offering in July 2000.
Illumina began offering single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotyping services in 2001 and launched its first system, the Illumina BeadLab, in 2002, using GoldenGate Genotyping technology. Illumina currently offers microarray-based products and services for an expanding range of genetic analysis sequencing, including SNP genotyping, gene expression, and protein analysis. Illumina's technologies are used by a broad range of academic, government, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and other leading institutions around the globe.
On January 26, 2007, the Company completed the acquisition of Hayward based Solexa, Inc. Solexa develops and commercializes genetic analysis technologies acquired from Manteia Predictive Medicine used to perform a range of analyses, including whole genome resequencing, gene expression analysis and small ribonucleic acid (RNA) analysis.
In June 2009, Illumina announced the launch of their own Personal Full Genome Sequencing Service at a depth of 30X for $48,000 per genome, and a year later dropped the price to $19,500. This is still too expensive for true commercialization but the price will most likely decrease substantially over the next few years as they realize economies of scale and given the competition with other companies such as Complete Genomics and Knome. As of May 2011, Illumina reduced the price to $4,000.
On January 25, 2012, Hoffmann-La Roche made an unsolicited bid to buy Illumina for $44.50 per share or about $5.7 billion.
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