In a bid to win back investor confidence, Illumina on Tuesday unveiled a three-year growth plan focused on easier DNA sequencing and improved data analysis for customers.
After the recent divestment of cancer diagnostics company Grail, Illumina on Tuesday hosted a call with investors laying out its plans for boosting revenue growth over the next three years.
Illumina “built the foundation of the genomics industry” and will lean into its expertise and “continue leading innovation across total sequencing workflows” providing new offerings for its customers, according to CEO Jacob Thaysen.
“Over the next three years, we will bring to market impressive new innovations that will redefine the genome and drive significant, deeper biological insights through multiomics,” Thaysen said.
In line with this strategy, Illumina on Tuesday unveiled a research partnership with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The collaboration—which will focus on single-cell sequencing and help accelerate the widespread use of high-capacity single-cell experiments—will rely on Illumina’s Fluent technology, which the sequencing giant acquired last month.
Developed by Fluent BioSciences, the Fluent single-cell analysis platform uses a proprietary partitioning system to segregate complex cell aggregates into smaller units, which can be further broken apart for single-cell applications, according to the biotech’s website.
Illumina’s announcement of the acquisition noted that Fluent “removes many of the barriers and limitations of current methods,” allowing more precise and higher-resolution analyses “accessible to a broader set of consumers and catalyzing new experiments.”
Niall Lennon, senior director of the Broad Institute’s genomic platform, said that single-cell sequencing “has transformed biomedical research in ways that were unimaginable as recently as 15 years ago.” By gaining access to Illumina’s Fluent technology, the collaboration “will support the road’s efforts toward enabling billion cell experiments.”
Illumina’s growth roadmap also involves “a series of innovations” that will let the company keep up with the “diverse and evolving needs of its customers,” according to the announcement, including helping its clients perform broader whole-genome sequencing, gain deeper insight from their sequences and more easily sequence samples.
Through its new strategy, Illumina is eyeing high-single-digit revenue growth by 2027. The company also expects to hit non-GAAP diluted earnings-per-share growth in the double-digit to teens range from 2025 to 2027.
Illumina’s business update on Tuesday comes after it wrapped up its divestiture of cancer diagnostics-focused Grail. The sequencing giant first moved to buy Grail in September 2020, an $8 billion deal that triggered a host of antitrust and shareholder problems for Illumina. After months of warnings and fines from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and European Commission, Illumina’s board of directors in June 2024 voted to finally let Grail go.
