Article Excerpt:
TWST: What is Sequenom?Dr. Stylli: The company is around 10 years old and had a very successful IPO in 2000 as part of the genomics bubble back then. It sort of faltered along the way. I joined about a year ago to help the company turn around and focus its businesses and really take it to the next level. The company is focused on fine mapping ' which is part of the overall genomic analysis market. Sequenom controls the intellectual property in most major countries worldwide for analyzing nucleic acids by mass spectrometry, and its technology platform and proprietary methods are protected by its IP. This technology solution provides almost a seamless transition from fine mapping through to molecular diagnostics, and those effectively are the areas that we are targeting. Our core business today is supplying solutions into the emerging fine mapping market, which is the segment of the genomics market that involves identifying DNA polymorphisms and looking at gene expression and methylation patterns. These are all important things that are going to have a profound impact in understanding genetic disorders as we move forward. We can do this incredibly competitively and cost effectively, and we are competing very well in that space, and I believe our business is showing signs of growth. Another area of our technology focus is in women's health. That's where we've decided to focus our diagnostic efforts. Women's health is a broad category. We are particularly focused on developing non-invasive prenatal diagnostic tests that are greatly enabled by our technology, although we are able to do this platform independently and we are planning to use whatever technologies are appropriate out there to solve this problem. However, MassARRAY', our core technology, is greatly enabling. So that's our primary focus.
TWST: What's the agenda at this point? What are your priorities for the
next six months?
Dr. Stylli: Our priorities for the next six months are to continue
growing our core tools business that is focused on genetic analysis. We
have more product launches that are planned in the next six months. We
have a completely new and powerful genotyping technology that should
enable us to test between 30 and 40 SNPs per test. That will drive the
cost down significantly from where we are today, but it is not just the
cost play ' it is also improving the overall quality and performance of
our testing procedures, particularly what is known as Call Rate. We're
looking to enhance that from the 95%, 96% range to hopefully somewhere
between 98% and 99%. The other aspect of our business that you should
see is that the new service business that we have established is showing
good signs of growth. We expect continued demand from customers for
outsourcing large chunks of their genomic discovery efforts to Sequenom
across the board, whether it's in SNP genotyping, quantitative gene
expression, or methylation analysis. We are working on a collaborative
basis with certain institutions, and we are also working simply in a
straight fee-for-service mode. So you will see progress in our service
business. You will also see advances in our platform and its utility in
diagnostics. As people may know, we have a long-standing collaboration
with Siemens. In fact, Siemens recently invested in the company as part
of the private placement financing that was approved by shareholders on
May 31. You will also see progress in our prenatal diagnostic efforts,
particularly with our first planned test related to Rhesus D.
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