San Diego-based biotech company Illumina bets on India for growth

While Illumina is reducing its workforce in the US, it plans to hire in India, where it currently employs only 30 people

San Diego-based biotech company Illumina is bolstering its presence in India, anticipating the addressable market in the country for genomic sequencing and testing to almost double from the current levels by 2027.

Speaking to Business Standard, Joydeep Goswami, chief financial officer, and chief strategy and corporate development officer of Illumina, said that as the GDP per capita grows, the spending on healthcare also grows, as people demand better care.

“Our mission is to use genomics for advancement of healthcare. We have been involved in the Genome India Project (that was sequencing genomes from the Indian population); we have been working in the area of infectious diseases like tuberculosis (TB). The idea is to sequence populations in India and understand diseases like cancer from an India genome perspective. This is the right time to enhance our presence in India,” Goswami explained.

The $32.7 billion firm has announced the opening of a new office in Bengaluru.

The expansion comes after working with its channel partner in India, Premas Life Sciences, for almost 16 years.

Illumina will continue to work with Premas to grow the genomics market in India.

The company estimates that the current size of the addressable market in India is between $50-65 million, and it could surpass $100 million by 2027.

Illumina has also been working on the TB programme in India.

Alongside its partner GenoScreen, it has formulated a specific test to identify the different strains of TB.

Illumina distributes this test across the world, especially in countries that are affected by TB. India has set an ambitious target of eliminating TB by 2025.

Goswami noted the prevalence of multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB cases in India. The sequencing technique has been endorsed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as a method to identify strains of drug resistant TB.

If the test can predict the resistance to specific antibiotics, the treatment can be tailored to the patient, thus making it more effective.

Goswami said that they are working with the Indian government – both at Central and state levels – and trying to encourage adoption of sequencing earlier in the process of TB treatment.

He added that India can build on the Covid-19 infrastructure of molecular diagnostics for TB.

Illumina’s method gives results between 24 to 48 hours, a considerable improvement on the conventional culture process that can take almost a month.

This allows for the selection of the right antibiotic for the patient.

“We are working with 11 states in India on TB; 7 are the most active: Haryana, Rajasthan, MP, Assam, UP, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra,” he noted.

While Illumina is trimming jobs in the US, it plans to hire in India. Currently, it employs around 30 people.

Goswami said that they look at emerging markets and start to invest in selected markets early. “We have done this in Brazil and China,” he added.

The importance of Indian genomic sequencing is becoming critical for the global pharma world, as it would have more representative data in the global database (which is now mostly European data), and thus help to develop more targeted therapies for diseases.

The Genome India Project is around two-thirds completed as of April 2023, and is scheduled to be completed by the end of this year.

The complete findings have not been released so far.

Around 7,000 genomes have already been sequenced, of which around 3,000 are already available to researchers.