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| Illumina's Lincoln Centre campus in Foster City, CA--Courtesy of BioMed Realty Trust |
Illumina ($ILMN) has been on a diagnostics roll as of late, inking deals and posting promising numbers for its next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology. Now, the company is poised for more growth in the coming year with plans for a new California facility.
The diagnostic giant signed a 15-year lease for a 360,000-square-foot campus in Foster City, CA, which will include two Class A laboratory and office buildings and amenities such as a large central quad with an outdoor amphitheater, playing fields and creative meeting spaces. Facilities are on track to receive LEED Gold Certification and Illumina expects work on laboratories and office buildings to be completed in 2017, the company said in a statement.
No financial terms were disclosed, but Illumina also has the option of expanding the campus by developing a third building, adding an additional 160,000 square feet and bringing the total size of the facility to 520,000 square feet. The company will also keep its space in Mission Bay, CA, which houses its incubator for startups developing innovative sequencing applications, the San Francisco Business Times reports.
"In addition to our new Mission Bay location, this campus will provide us with an opportunity to bring together employees from several different sites as we continue to optimize and grow our presence in the Bay Area," Marc Stapley, Illumina's Chief Financial Officer, said in a statement. "We also expect this campus will provide stronger ties with our customers and partners, while establishing a state-of-the-art work environment to retain and attract the most talented employees in our industry."
The expansion plans come at a critical moment for Illumina, as the company continues to chart diagnostics growth and forge ahead with R&D. In Q3 2014, Illumina's revenue jumped 35% to $481 million over the same quarter last year--the company's highest growth rate since the second quarter of 2011. Illumina CEO Jay Flatley attributed the record-setting pace to increased demand of the company's HiSeq X Ten and NextSeq 500 sequencing systems.
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| Illumina CEO Jay Flatley |
In November, the company said it would team up with Sequenta to commercialize a diagnostics kit that detects a condition associated with cancer remission. The same month, Illumina inked a deal with French diagnostic outfit bioMérieux to developing an NGS system to identify infectious bacteria in service labs and hospitals.
A new facility also helps Illumina gain some upward momentum as it recoups from its recently resolved patent battle with archrival Sequenom ($SQNM). Under the agreement, Illumina will fork over $50 million upfront to Sequenom and will make ongoing payments to the company through 2020. But Illumina's Verinata Health will also have exclusive worldwide rights to use the companies' pooled intellectual property to develop its in vitro prenatal diagnostic kits and to license its technology to outside laboratories that want to create their own prenatal tests.
- read the statement
- get more from the San Francisco Business Times