Keeping Up With Flatley

Illumina CEO Jay Flatley tells Xconomy's Luke Timmerman that for a long time there was no innovation in the industry until the advent of next-gen sequencing which caused "huge amount of money" to be invested in the space. Currently, Flatley considers Life Technologies to be Illumina's primary competitor, but says his company is "way ahead" in terms of market share. However, there are also a few upstarts, such as Complete Genomics, who are encroaching on part of the market Illumina considers to be its own. As for when the $1,000 genome will materialize, Flatley says that "if you count bioinformatics, if you count sample prep, if you count data storage in the number, if you count it all, then it's somewhere in the three to five-year timeframe. ... The sequencing will get there faster than that."