History of Illumina Sequencing

Balasubramanian and Klenerman approached the venture capital firm Abingworth Management and obtained initial seed funding to form Solexa in 1998. Early research and development work was conducted in the Cambridge Chemistry Department until 2000, when Solexa’s corporate facilities were established at Chesterford Research Park.

In 2001, the Solexa team’s research progress attracted £12 million in Series A funding, enabling it to build its management team. Three years later, Solexa acquired molecular clustering technology from Manteia. The amplification of single DNA molecules into clusters enhanced the fidelity and accuracy of gene calling, while reducing the cost of the system optics through generation of a stronger signal.

The Solexa team sequenced the complete genome of the bacteriophage phiX-174, the same genome Sanger first sequenced using his method. However, the SBS technology generated significantly more sequencing data, delivering over 3 million bases from a single run.

In 2005, Solexa acquired instrumentation company Lynx Therapeutics in a reverse merger, becoming an international public company (NASDAQ) with offices in Chesterford, UK and Hayward, CA. Engineering and software production teams based in Hayward immediately went to work transforming the successful Solexa prototype into a commercial sequencing instrument.

The first Solexa sequencer, the Genome Analyzer, was launched in 2006 and gave scientists the power to sequence 1 gigabase (Gb) of data in a single run.

Solexa was acquired by Illumina in early 2007. In the intervening years, numerous microbe, plant, human, and animal genomes have been sequenced with this technology. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) data output has increased at a rate that outpaces Moore's law, more than doubling each year.