As today’s growth investors search for pockets of innovation to drive stock performance, genomics is emerging as a growing market within the life sciences sector, offering attractive growth opportunities and products that will potentially change the field of research.

“You have companies like Illumina (ILMN), for example, who earlier this week launched a pretty impressive new DNA sequencer, the HiSeq 2000,” said Isaac Ro, an analyst who covers the life science tools and diagnostics sector for Leerink Swann & Company. This product has the potential to provide four times the amount of genetic information per experiment with improved performance in comparison to other products currently on the market.

“I just raised my price target for [Illumina] because I believe this company is innovating not only in genomics, but they actually also have an entree eventually into the diagnostics world as well,” Ro explained. “So there are a couple of things that, over the next couple of years, that are going to change the market and could take them well over $1 billion in revenues.”

Ro is also positive on Illumina’s efforts to bring genomic sequencing to the masses, lowering the cost of sequencing technology to a price that would enable all research labs to buy and use the company’s products.

“And so they’ve got a technology still in the stock works that potentially emerges later this year or early next called Avantome, and there’s very little known about it other than it’s going to be ultra low cost, relatively high throughput. It would be about the size of a microwave and could go in every research lab,” Ro said. “That’s something that would really expand the market again.”

This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 11:55 am and is filed under General Investing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.