Snip from GS report on their conference presentation:
ILMN (IL/N) - Continued progress on proprietary genotyping systems
Today, Mr. Jay Flatley, President and CEO of Illumina, gave an update on the company's progress.
We continue to rate Illumina In-Line based on its unique and broadly applicable technology as well
as momentum from launch of the company's proprietary genotyping system. Risks to our view
include weak demand from service customers, slower than expected sales of the genotyping system,
dependence on financial markets and litigation with Applied Biosytems.
During the conference, Mr. Flatley announced the development of the Sentrix BeadChip Platform,
which is a customizable microarray substrate designed to expand the market potential for its
BeadArray technology. To date, Illumina has installed two of its proprietary genotyping systems at
customer sites and intends to install three more during 2003. While the wide adoption of single
nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analysis has been slow due to the high cost per data point and low
throughput, Illumina's technology is well suited to address these hurdles. In addition to the Sentrix
BeadChip, in January, Illumina introduced two SNP genotyping products, one product for genetic
linkage analysis and the other product for fine chromosomal or whole-genome mapping. In
February, Illumina introduced its RefSet Oligos for the Human Genome, a whole-genome
oligonucleotide reference set for spotted gene expression arrays.
Mr. Flatley also updated investors on the status of 2003 milestones, as follows: - Sign 15 service
contracts - Ship 5 genotyping systems (one installed at The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute;
another announced sale to Genome Quebec) - Develop a minimum of 100,000 assays for the
HapMap NIH project *- Launch whole genome oligonucleotide set (Introduced in February 2003) -
Launch system for gene expression profiling
* - completed |
