SAN FRANCISCO – Speaking at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference on Tuesday, Illumina CEO Jacob Thaysen said the firm's NovaSeq X platform is driving a "return to growth," with clinical customers helping the firm to narrowly beat expectations for the fourth quarter.
He also provided comments related to announcements Illumina made earlier in the week, including a partnership with Nvidia on data processing and artificial intelligence.
The firm placed 91 NovaSeq X instruments in the fourth quarter, bringing the active installed base to 630. "By the second half of this year, we should see [NovaSeq X] account for 75 percent of total high-throughput sequencing volume shipped and account for 50 percent of total high-throughput consumables revenue," he said. As of the end of the year, the firm has also placed "more than 70" MiSeq i100s, a new low-throughput sequencer the firm launched in 2024.
During the Q&A portion of the session, CFO Ankur Dhingra added that clinical customers drove the year-end push in NovaSeq X orders. "Several bought multiple units of [the NovaSeq X]," he said, noting that many planned to use them for minimal residual disease testing.
On Monday, Illumina announced a partnership with Nvidia to bring its Dragen genome analysis software on to Nvidia's graphics processing unit hardware. Dragen was designed to run on custom field-programmable gate array hardware to speed up analysis. AI algorithms are also a focus of the deal, and Illumina plans to bring Nvidia's foundational models to its software stack.
The amount of genomic and multiomic data is such that "no human can do it in front of a computer with an Excel sheet," Thaysen said. After the session, he told GenomeWeb that the general idea is to allow customers to easily bring the data they have generated and analyzed with Illumina products to foundational AI models, such as virtual cell models trained on single-cell gene expression data.
"We want to get them access to the best tools," he said. "I think we'll all sit here in a few years and see this as the starting of a new era."
Prior to the session, Illumina reported preliminary Q4 2024 revenues of approximately $1.10 billion, up 1 percent from Q4 2023 and slightly above the consensus Wall Street estimate of $1.07 billion. For the full-year, Illumina reported preliminary revenues of $4.33 billion, down 2 percent from 2023 but above the Wall Street estimate of $4.32 billion.
Dhingra noted that consumables revenues were approximately $720 million to $730 million in Q4, down sequentially, though the quarter is "always a bit slower" with fewer working days, especially in the US.
Thaysen added that Illumina has 22,000 active installed instruments. Clinical customers now make up 56 percent of its user base with 44 percent in research. In addition, he noted that 50 percent of its clinical customer base is in oncology.
In addition to the MiSeq i100, Thaysen mentioned several other highlights from 2024. The firm bought single-cell prep company Fluent BioSciences and announced several other multiomics products.
Illumina Protein Prep, the result of a collaboration with SomaLogic, now part of Standard BioTools, is being launched in the first half of 2025. The firm is also going to launch an early-access program for its Constellation Mapped Reads in the first half of the year, targeting a 2026 commercial launch.
With products like Constellation, which not only eliminates sequencing library prep but also provides bonus information to help with detecting structural variants and haplotype phasing, Illumina is trying to change the conversation in sequencing from being about cost per Gb to being about "lowest end-to-end cost and cost per insight," Thaysen said.
Thaysen told GenomeWeb that he did not yet have a number in mind for, say, a whole-genome workflow with a library prepared using Constellation-mapped read prep, NovaSeq X reagents, and Dragen analysis, but that any application would be priced based on the value Illumina believes it is bringing to the customer, whether its WGS, proteomics, or anything else.
Thaysen and Dhingra said that while they were "super pleased" with the end to the year, they did not expect NovaSeq X placements to continue at the same rate going into 2025.
For now, Illumina expects growth in the low-single-digit percentages with reported revenue in the range of $4.28 billion to $4.40 billion and non-GAAP diluted EPS growth of about 10 percent.
When asked about exposure to a potential decrease in National Institutes of Health funding, Thaysen said he doesn't expect a lot of changes. "The areas we're in, genomics and multiomics, will likely see increased funding," he said, noting that he's "more positive today than a few weeks ago."