Illumina to Buy Avantome for Up to $60M; Long, Cheap Reads Will Target Sanger

The company was co-founded by Mostafa Ronaghi, a principal investigator at the Stanford Genome Technology Center. He is one of the inventors of pyrosequencing and a previous collaborator of Illumina. Illumina hopes that the new technology, which may compete with 454’s platform, will complement its Genome Analyzer.