Illumina Licenses Confocal Scanning Patents From Amersham Biosciences
Company to Commercialize BeadArray Scanner by End of 2002
SAN DIEGO--(BW HealthWire)--Feb. 19, 2002--Illumina, Inc. announced today that it has signed an agreement with Amersham Biosciences, the life sciences business of Amersham plc (LSE: NYSE: OSE: AHM), granting Illumina a non-exclusive, worldwide license under five fundamental patents involving engineering designs and methods for confocal scanning for use with its proprietary BeadArray(TM) product line. Additional terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Confocal scanning technology provides the high sensitivity and resolution required to meet the demanding performance requirements of microarray applications. Illumina is developing its confocal scanning instrument to address the extremely dense geometries (5 micron core-to-core spacing) of its bead-based Sentrix(TM) arrays.
``We are pleased to have access to this market-proven technology,'' commented Bob Kain, Vice President of Engineering and an original inventor under the patents. ``These inventions have enabled the development of commercial, high-performance scanning instruments and we will now extend this technology to our BeadArray platform. Based on the successful development effort to date, we expect to introduce our BeadArray scanner by year end,'' added Kain.
``Our commercialization strategy centers on the development and marketing of complete genetic analysis solutions to a global target customer base,'' stated Jay Flatley, Illumina President and CEO. ``The addition of scanning instrumentation to our product portfolio is an integral part of achieving these goals.''
Illumina (Nasdaq: ILMN; www.illumina.com) is developing next-generation tools that permit large-scale analysis of genetic variation and function. The Company's proprietary BeadArray(TM) technology will provide the throughput, cost effectiveness and flexibility necessary to enable researchers in the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries to perform the billions of tests necessary to extract medically valuable information from advances in genomics and proteomics. Illumina's technology will have applicability across a wide variety of industries beyond life sciences and pharmaceuticals, including agriculture, food, chemicals and petrochemicals. |
