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<span style="font-weight: 400">Long at the forefront of gene-sequencing and -therapy technology, Illumina is picking up steam thanks to the proliferation of DNA sequencing across a variety of medical applications—including tracking infectious diseases like COVID-19. Illumina says there are now some 70 countries using its tech to monitor and analyze samples of the coronavirus, hoping to track how it could mutate into variants. Just as Illumina has helped sharply reduce the cost of genetic sequencing, it aims to do the same for cancer diagnostics via its acquisition of biotech Grail (though the deal faces scrutiny from antitrust regulators).</span>

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Illumina | 2021 Change the World

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Illumina

Long at the forefront of gene-sequencing and -therapy technology, Illumina is picking up steam thanks to the proliferation of DNA sequencing across a variety of medical applications—including tracking infectious diseases like COVID-19. Illumina says there are now some 70 countries using its tech to monitor and analyze samples of the coronavirus, hoping to track how it could mutate into variants. Just as Illumina has helped sharply reduce the cost of genetic sequencing, it aims to do the same for cancer diagnostics via its acquisition of biotech Grail (though the deal faces scrutiny from antitrust regulators).

Illumina | 2021 Change the World | Fortune

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I mentioned this idea of the genomic revolution which we've been talking about for a while. But we're now in, actually, a revolution of revolutions. There's so much happening. It's not just that we've got Faster and cheaper, radically faster and cheaper genes sequencing technology. The next generation of that. But in addition, we have a whole new set of gene editing tools that are radically changing Science. The ability to actually intervene in our own DNA We have an additional to that, the revolution in AI and [ UNKNOWN ] which we have been hearing about. Which is giving us brand new molecular genetic targets of extraordinary complexity that we never even dreamed of percuing before. We have a revolution immune oncology. Which is helping us to understand how to harness the immune system to fight things like cancer, and we've already talked about the revolutions in 5G and mobility and sensors and everything else in robotics. So my question for you, Simone, to start with, is, is this time different? Are we really in a place. Where this confluence of revolutions is different than it ever has been before. And if so, how on earth do you start to invest in that? I think the revolution is definitely here. It's a revolution of, it's a combination of revolution of biology and Deep machine learning, AI. So for example, if we want to go for cancer early detection, it's almost a dream but is a combination of understanding the genomic features and also the ability Too deep sequencing by using AI tours. Yeah, just a follow up though when there's so many new technologies, how do you make the bets that harness all of them together or do you focus on very specific kinds of tech Cuz your investments are really unique as I look at them. In my experience, I think that formula only applies to venture capital investment or ventyre investors who intend to invest company at very early stage. So, to be susccessful actually the principle Is not to invest, not to diversify. Actually, it's a concentrating to concentrating areas where you can understand the technology or you have the ability to assemble resources that can help you capture the most advanced technology. Yeah. So the key is not to Not to dench the decentralize is to focus. That's the truth, that's intresting. Liching I wana mention this other revolution which I didn't mention, include that, which is the consumer revolution. And so much of the growth in your business making you extraordinary Gene sequencing devices there has been a movement towards things like 23andme and ancestry. com and coloring garden and several others but recently over the summer there was some softness in that market and that affected your stock And you know, it's still sort of hasn't quite recovered. The question is, is that a temporary setback? Are we gonna still see the consumer market dominate in the next 10 year ?. So I see most of the audience a Chinese, can I just speaking Chinese ?. Yes, please. [ FOREIGN ]. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] For the Illumina technology in US they have mass gene company like 23 ME as you mentioned and a host of companies are using gene technologies during their start ups They use a genomics, genomics analysis because US is composed of different races. So race analysis is a key topic. But after all the population being analyzed by the races for the mass genomic companies they are declining in their business. So all these companies are trying very hard to explore. The new areas for example, genes, impacts to the human health to their lifestyles. [ FOREIGN ] And also to the nutrition aspects. Some gene companies were even dedicated to the education of the infants. And also babies and children. So they were doing explorations as soon as they identify the new areas. Definitely they're going to be promising futures in those areas in China, situations that are slightly different Large majority of gene companies are still in its infancy appeared at like 23 magic box and other companies that they have a very good application situations. So a lot of continued investment and still enjoy rapid development. Going into this in a big way. I mean, you've got the UK for example. Which is sequencing 450, 000 people. You've got in the US you've got the all of us. Program at the NIH, which is 2 million, and then you just signed a deal with in China. To do something similar >> Indeed. Last year, we successfully. One bead, it was tendering process, it's in the [ UNKNOWN ] Hospital University and it was a joint project by the Minister of Health, and the most, the Minister of Science and Technology. The Selected the our company to conduct the population cohort stud. This is very conducive and beneficial to accumulate the big gene data for china and. With this data bases is very conducive to study the treatment that knowledge is very. I'm very happy that the [ UNKNOWN ] university and also most and ministry of houses selected our technology, we are going to learn statistics from the UK and the US. As well as those cutting edge technologies in the information technology field in our cohort study. One of the things that ching mentioned is that drug companies are using this genetic profiling to understand how drugs work. There's a another revolution happening right here in china there are 15, 000 drugs in the drug development pipeline here. And obviously, GPC is China's largest producer and distributor of drugs, including traditional Chinese medicines. What are you doing to make sure that there are new technologies that are finding new biological targets for those kinds of drugs? And could you talk a little bit about the effort to create international standards for some of these Chinese traditional medicines. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Just now, Mr. Lee mentioned a lot about the logical technologies, breakthroughs in the prevention, diagnosis, even the treatment of the diseases issue, even the culture, tissue culture applications. We know a lot of about logical technologies since 1970s. After four decades involvement, remarkable progresses and milestones being made. A lot of new products provided to the humankind to improve the well being of the humans in China [ BLANK_AUDIO ] In the full commercialization industrialization of a gen technology. But is a gradual process. Our group as the largest leading pharmaceutical company in China. We ranked number one four consecutive eight years in recent years. We focus on the biological drugs RND work, especially the whole value chain. In particular, the supporting services in the whole value chain and including the Dagny gnosis by using biological. Technologies and also the biological treatment. We had a lot of strengths and advantages. But in rolling out those technologies we have one gene drug to cure the 10 %. the incidence Hepatitis disease in China, hepatitis B, but the review and approval process in China because there's an inadequate guideline in China available. So our work Progress the very slowly but in this process, the cutting edge technology like from Illumina and the other companies, this would definitely promote the rules and regulation drafting by the city. In China reveal center of the drugs. And so we look forward to that. Just get into this idea of AI and using artificial intelligence, in all of these intersections that we're talking about, and, particularly in the case of cancer and last year on this stage, you said That the cancer cell is the perfect AI cell. I love that, you said, it grows faster, it evolves faster, it thinks faster. It evades faster. It evades detection faster. Essentially, it is a super intelligent cell. And you're also using the same kind of technologies to outwit that AI cell So I think to combat cancer, right? The most relevant factor actually is to be able to detect cancer earlier, once tumor forms it For one CM tumor has about 1 billion cells and it has all the ASL features. So it is much difficult to defeat cancer once it's there. So the best revolutionary breakthrough in cancer treatment actually. Is to detect cancer faster earlier. And given that alumina has done its job by giving us all sorta sequencing. Sequencing tours, different size, throughput, etc. So that part of the leg of the revolutions already in terms of early cancer detection. The rest is up to the industry to come up with the sample preparation tours in order for this whole game to happen. So Croton really talked about a number of companies when we talk about sequencing counsel related sequencing a lot of names come to pop up. For example, 23andMe, Brio, Foundation Medicine, God and Health. So I like to take this opportunity to clarify a bit. 23andMe is for fun, a lot of fun. Because it gives you the, a, gives you the genetic feature As to who you are, what your family tree is and it tells you the medically, what kind of health risk you might be exposed to. But it is not intent for any diagnosis, it is not to be able to detect cancer, definitely not. For $ 99, it wont even give you a deep, give you a whole Genome sequencing. Picture unless Illuminati achieves another revolution driving down the cost, you know, by by five by ten votes, for example. But Ching is already in fact we were talking earlier and if you go from the cost of sequencing an entire genome 20 years ago. From 3 million to thousand dollars. We're pretty close to that now, in terms of liquid biopsies. So this is what you were referring to the ability to detect telltale fragments of DNA, tiny little fragments of DNA and use that to as biomarkers of a disease and progression. You've spun of a company Ilumina called Grel to do just that. And there have been a number of these liquid biopsy companies. How good are they in terms of identifying. Disease progression. To choose? Yeah, I mean because someone says you know, we've got to get earlier in the interview earlier that disease. I think that grill is a you know, I'm very, we're very glad that Illumina help produced a company called the Grill, and Grill 23 and me is for fun. [ UNKNOWN ] is a dream, a beautiful dream intends to detect cancer at very early stage to substantially increase survival rate. What it does is get a tube of blood from you and then try to capture the DNA and RNA released from tumor cell into the blood. So it is relevant from science point of view. But the difficult is that the difficulty or the challenges that it won't be able to tell you or reflect the genomic feature from the tumors from which they originated. So I might be able to tell you You may have cancer but I don't know what kind of cancer it is and how it comes, how it manage to come to you. But without [ UNKNOWN ], we don't even [ UNKNOWN ] to dream, so [ UNKNOWN ] is a beautiful dream but I think there is hope, the Hope is another company called [ UNKNOWN ] Yeah. Strife is backed by very solid. The mission of life is the same as Braille. But the difference is, I think is that allow me to say that was no I'm not being disrespectful to grow I think Griff established a torch which is really important, but thrive is backed by very solid science. The John Hopkins team through decades of research in 2018 has put out a beautiful paper in science. It says, it is able to localize the mutated cancer basically it nails down From hundreds, hundreds, thousands of Anoma numbers will mutations, it is able to narrow down 61 cancer related hotspots mutations. Yeah. Where's that 61? somewhere? So I want to come back and change just a second, but I want to see if anyone has a question out there. And if you do, we've got some mic Wranglers and we'll have a paddle up there. anybody have a question? Okay, well if you do just a second I'll come right back to you. Ching we talked about this idea of using AI though to be able to make a little bit more sense to. To ask those impossible question if you will about what chain integrations are most likely to cause disease later on, whether it's a misinterpretation or a delusion of a specific nuclear tide or whatever it is, we know that in some cases some mutations are more important than others. Can you talk a little bit about how alumina is filling that gap? Yeah. So, it is like this alumina. The way we fill the gap is different. We also have sold a lot of R & D of different decisions and diagnostics methods. However, we pay more attention. We rely more on opening our technological platform to engage many companies on our platform to study to research, diagnostic of diseases, the nutrition models and mechanism. For example, in China right now in tumor Way a burning rock in the, when work was done. So microbiology, [ INAUDIBLE ] partner with [ UNKNOWN ]. A minor project. Illumina will open our platform, not we ourselves using a I- tool to explore the technologies that exist. Rather, we open up our system. All the IVD diagnosis interested companies can work on our platform to do their R & D. So the development results, indeed, is changing every day. Basically globally in China every day we have paper coming out. To see the diagnostic of many diseases is marching making progress. So in this aspect, we are very unique company relying on ecosystem to get the solutions for human diseases, diagnostics. [ INAUDIBLE ] machines and tools are used in 90 % of the worlds sequencing. So, it's kind of an amazing figure have you managed to capture the entire market there. Let's see if we have a question from the audience, anybody? Yes [ INAUDIBLE ] Yeah, we got one right there [ UNKNOWN ] I identified you but you must well identify yourself again Martin Raves from the BCG Henderson Institute. I want you to ask. These technologies have profound functionality because one of the problems with pharmaceutical researchers stagnant productivity, valuable drugs per dollar or unit of effort. Have we reached the point yet where these technologies are impacting on that stagnating RD productivity? Anybody, will you take that or madam Lue. Yeah, if I may. Yes I think sequencig There has a clinical application either to test cancer patients or go for early detection. But sequencing is also very relevant in basic research. For example, a company called the Foundation Medicine. It has a box of 500 genes. It really is very relevant in enabling research To once we identify a new mechanism, but how to make it a clinical relevant to what to link to what gene mutation to what disease, I think gene genome technology has come to a point where it is. It is very enabling to basic research or clinical research. Yeah. We want one more question. We got time for one more question. Anybody? Like son? Yeah, anybody? I thought I saw another hand. Somebody shy out there doesn't wanna ask a question. All right. So, Madam, I've got a question for you on again, getting into the idea With so much histories of science in the Chinese drug development world, and yet there isn't that much, there aren't that many Chinese made drugs that are actually being sold overseas and markets overseas. How are you beginning to change that? And we saw one approval and FDA approval for a new Alzheimer's drug just the other day. But this is it needs to be a paradigm shift for China to enter the world of innovative pharma. Thank you very much for your question. [ UNKNOWN ] So as Mars, this disease is an important disease which is become more and more in a society, everybody is challenged by this Alzheimer's. So Traditional Chinese Medicine has 5000 years of history. Is very employed a very important role for the environment progress of Chinese society so traditional medicine, so it has its uniqueness in treating these diseases. So my company has been dedicated to our RND the of this kind of our traditional medicines. So, right now one of the drugs we did we have completed all the clinical work for early stage or mid stage Alzheimer's be. It has very the advocacy is very good but internationally, we do not have a appraisal evaluation standard. Or criteria so to speak. So this product has been placed in the drug appraisal center of China. Actually our product this product is even better more efficient than the just approved by the government [ UNKNOWN ] Alzheimer is better However, we still want to make more effort to promote democratization the market launch of this program, so we can have a very good advocacy. So this traditional mindset can serve a bigger segment of the population. It is our belief traditional Chinese medicine, incurring preventing human disease will play a even bigger role. Thank you very much. We're gonna have to leave it there. Than you Madame Yu, Lee Ching, and Simone Song, appreciate that. Thank you. That was a great conversation. [ APPLAUSE ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Genomic Sequencing Technology Has Become Indispensible

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Leaders and investors in sequencing technology share the latest developments and breakthroughs in the space, and discuss the implications for humanity–and business.

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