Illumina has filled two key C-suite posts, naming Mike Sullivan as chief commercial officer and Julie Coletti as chief legal officer as the DNA sequencing giant works to keep its turnaround on track after years of regulatory, geopolitical and investor turbulence.
Sullivan will take over Illumina’s global commercial organization July 20, while Coletti will join Aug. 3 to lead the company’s legal, regulatory and government affairs teams. Coletti will also serve as corporate secretary to Illumina’s board.
In a July 9 release, Illumina CEO Jacob Thaysen said the appointments will add experienced commercial and legal leaders to the company’s executive team as it works to serve customers, drive growth and advance its strategy.
“I look forward to working closely with both of them as we continue helping customers unlock new insights across genomics, multiomics, and human health,” Thaysen said.
The appointments come about two years after Illumina moved to unwind its ill-fated Grail acquisition. Illumina founded Grail and spun it out in 2016, only to buy the cancer blood test maker back in 2021 for $8 billion. The acquisition set off a yearslong battle spanning regulators, courtrooms and activist investor Carl Icahn’s calls for leadership changes, before Illumina divested Grail as an independent public company in June 2024.
Sullivan arrives with more than 30 years of commercial leadership experience across diagnostics, precision medicine, healthcare and life sciences. He most recently served as chief commercial officer at Caris Life Sciences, where he led global commercial operations across oncology diagnostics and precision medicine. Before Caris, Sullivan held senior commercial roles at Roche Diagnostics, Ortho Clinical Diagnostics, IDEXX Laboratories and Abbott Diagnostics.
The hire gives Illumina a new sales chief months after Everett Cunningham, its former chief commercial officer, left to become CEO and president of Quanterix. Cunningham’s move put him at the helm of a company trying to build a broader business in ultrasensitive biomarker detection, including Alzheimer’s disease testing.
Coletti, meanwhile, brings legal and regulatory experience from across medtech and life sciences. She previously served as chief legal and regulatory officer at Align Technology and held senior legal leadership roles at Danaher and Bayer HealthCare.
That legal bench will be especially relevant for Illumina as the company continues to navigate the regulatory and competitive scrutiny that followed its Grail acquisition. The deal drew pressure from U.S. and European regulators and led the European Commission to impose a record 432 million euro gun-jumping fine, though the basis for that fine was later removed after Europe’s top court ruled the commission lacked jurisdiction to review the transaction.
The company has also been working through China-related pressure. Illumina was barred in March 2025 from exporting its DNA sequencers to China after Beijing shut out the company in response to expanded U.S. tariffs on Chinese-made products. China said in November that it would lift the export ban, though Illumina remained on the country’s Unreliable Entities List, mandating government approval for instrument purchases. In its most recent quarterly filing, Illumina said first-quarter revenue was hit by a $20 million drop in Greater China sales, primarily due to its inclusion on the list.
Illumina has shown signs of stabilization this year. In its first-quarter results, the San Diego-based company reported revenue of $1.09 billion, up 4.8% from the same period a year earlier, and raised its full-year revenue and earnings guidance. The company said demand for NovaSeq X was increasing as clinical customers expand into new application areas.
Illumina has also been trying to broaden the reach of its sequencing ecosystem. In April 2025, the company teamed up with Tempus AI to promote wider use of DNA sequencing tests across major disease areas and to train AI algorithms on genomic data. A few months earlier, Illumina outlined its entry into spatial transcriptomics, a market it has since entered with the launch of StrataMap Spatial, an end-to-end sequencing-based research solution.