Hitachi, which signed a 10-year instrument development deal with Nanogen last month, is projecting wild growth for its life sciences division. The division combined a corporate infusion with a $9 million grant it received last year from Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry to gear up to tackle the genomics market.
The division has merged with Hitachi’s instruments and information groups in Kawagoe City, and broadened its services to address high-throughput sequencing, SNP scanning and scoring, expression profiling, protein network analysis, and bioinformatics. Jointly with Applied Biosystems, Hitachi recently introduced a 16-capillary small-scale sequencing machine.
Takao Iwayanagi, chief technology officer for the life sciences group says he expects revenues this year of $7.2 million. But by 2002, he expects to multiply that almost 20-fold to reach revenues of $135 million.