Illumina CEO Jay Flatley
When Renee Valints daughter Shelby was born in 2000, she seemed weak, like a rag doll. Shelby learned to walk and talk, but she did so slowly, missing developmental milestones. By age 4 she was confined to a wheelchair, and she started using a computerized voice to communicate in the fifth grade. Desperate, Renee took her from Phoenix to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. for one last week of tests and discussion with some of the countrys top doctors.
They all put up their hands and said, We have no idea whats wrong with her, says Renee. At that point she couldnt even move. I bathed her, fed her. She couldnt even swallow. I had to thicken her liquids so she could swallow without choking. It was like a nightmare. That was it. There was nowhere else to go.
But then doctors at the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix used a new technologyDNA sequencingto look at Shelbys genes. Based in part on what they found, they guessed that she might respond to the same dopamine-boosting medicines that are given to Parkinsons patients. Three months later Shelby got up out of her wheelchair. The next day she walked to school, and she hasnt used the wheelchair since. Now she likes to dance.
Stories like this are creating an exploding market for DNA-sequencing machines. Major cancer centers are using them as a standard way to pick medicines for patients who have little other hope. DNA sequencers now allow disorders like Down syndrome and other conditions to be detected in a fetus using a vial of the mothers blood. They are replacing older, more expensive methods of genetic testing.
And the change is coming at breakneck speed. How fast? In the 1980s and 1990s the PC revolution was driven by an insight that legendary Intel cofounder and chairman Gordon Moore had as a researcher in 1965: The number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years. This was not a law of science but of will: It was a target for engineers to hit.
But over the past 13 years the cost of sequencing DNA has dropped 1,000 times more than Moores Law, from $100 million per human genome to only $1,000.
The only thing more extraordinary than the growth rate of the sequencing revolution is that the beneficiary is a single company, Illumina of San Diego, and most of the credit for the rate of change can be laid at the feet of one entrepreneur, Chief Executive Jay Flatley. Thanks largely to Flatleys leadership, Illumina emerged as the dominant maker of DNA sequencers eight years ago and has maintained 80% market share despite an assault by several well-funded competitors.
Since 2008 Illuminas sales and profit have both increased 147%, to $1.42 billion and $125 million, respectively, as the stock increased 617% and the companys market capitalization reached $23 billion.
We have predictors of market sizes, says Flatley, 61. Anything weve done so far says that in our time horizon, which is five or ten years, if we remain the leader in sequencing we can grow our company with a much more fantastic return on investment than anything else.
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Flatley's Law: How One Company Is Creating Medicine's Genetic Revolution