For a while, Illumina—the 800-pound gorilla of genomics—could do no wrong. The DNA-sequencing company's market cap more than quadrupled from 2012, to peak at a whopping $34 billion, fueled in part by the growing hype around the potential of genomics to transform how we prevent, diagnose, and treat disease, as well as facilitate medical research discoveries.
Illumina is also the primary game in town when it comes to DNA-sequencing machines. It has a near-monopoly in the research market, where its instruments have sequenced an estimated 90% of all the human genomes ever sequenced.
