Why does roche want illumina

What the company was looking for here was to add a new, innovative business unit that would maintain its own research and development organization. Of course, Illumina also has an established product line and steady revenue stream, so Roche would have become a sequencing company.

Going hostile would have alienated management and left employees disgruntled. After losing their bid to buy Illumina, Roche is not likely to go after a smaller sequencing company.

If they had been after disruptive technology there are other, much cheaper companies they could have acquired, such as Oxford Nanopore, Helicos, or Pacific Biosciences. The larger goal of this acquisition has always been apparent - to integrate sequencing into the development of drugs and, in turn, use the technology to diagnose disease.

While Roche would continue to gain revenue by selling the sequencing technology, the ultimate goal was to drive pharmaceutical sales. The tender offer for Illumina expires on Friday and Roche said it would not extend the bid as the U. The decision is a victory for Illumina in its battle to stay independent, although some investors think Roche may wait in the wings for a fresh opportunity to pounce if the U. O of the genomics business", rejected Roche's sweetened takeover offer and had repeatedly urged shareholders to vote against appointing Roche's nominees to its board.

The reason that we are interested in acquiring Illumina is that, first of all, it's a very strong sequencing company, it's the number one in sequencing and microarrays today, and in fact, we feel it's very complementary to our and NimbleGen business, which is also why we see a very good fit here.

They have different capabilities, they have different technologies, and it's something that we think combined can make an even stronger presence in the genomics marketplace. Where do you see the greatest potential for clinical or diagnostic applications of sequencing, and why do you think the technology is now mature enough to start developing platforms for that? Until recently, I think the technology was really more geared towards large sequencing labs only, due to the cost, due to the throughput, due to some of the read length and accuracy.

And recently, what we have seen in the short-read technology, particularly at Illumina, is that it's gotten to a stage where it's now really appropriate, with the advances that have been made in short-read technology, for it to be much more commonly used, first of all, deeper into the research segments outside of just the very large genomic centers and more into the medium to smaller size research labs, because the cost and throughput is at a level now that really make it more appropriate for that.

And secondly, as you mentioned, in the mid to longer term, we see the potential for this technology also in the clinical setting. And the reason for the timing now is that again, we feel the technology is at a stage where it could be applied in a clinical setting from a cost and accuracy standpoint. And also, there is a big demand growing out there in the clinical community for this technology.

The reason that demand is growing is the advances that have been made in science over the past decade. The understanding of the mutational aspects of cancer is increasing every day, and more importantly, the action that we can take on that understanding is increasing every day, with more therapeutics, a better understanding of how to approach the course of disease.

So these things are coming together at the same time, and I think that will also, in the mid to longer term, drive the demand for sequencing in a clinical setting.

Why does Roche need an acquisition to move into the clinical diagnostic sequencing market? Why is it not sufficient to collaborate on clinical applications of Illumina's platforms, as Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics is doing? Part of what has made Roche Diagnostics, I believe, the number one company in diagnostics, and consistently allowed us to grow faster than the marketplace, is that we really take advantage of the breadth of technologies that we have.

We take advantage of our global scale, and by that, I mean we do have a total solution offering for our customers out there, everything from our immunoassay clinical chemistry business through our number one PCR business to our number one tissue diagnostics business.

We think there is great complementarity now moving forward also in incorporating sequencing into that technology offering, in the same way that we leverage the other technologies. So we think having those within one organization provides a unique service to our customers and allows us to provide better solutions for patients at the end of it.

Can you comment on how an acquisition of Illumina would affect any partnerships Illumina currently has with other diagnostic firms, like Siemens? No, I could not comment on that because I'm not intimately familiar with those types of collaborations. What I can say is, from a customer perspective, and this is very important, we would envision that all customer commitments and contracts that are in place we would intend to honor post transaction, on both the Roche side and the Illumina side.

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