Spare a thought for Illumina. The $56 billion dollar titan of genomics has become the world’s leading supplier of DNA sequencing technology. That’s been great for the company’s bottom line over the years. But Illumina’s market dominance is making it incredibly difficult to expand the business.
The latest example came this week when the Federal Trade Commission moved to block Illumina’s $7.1 billion merger with the cancer testing company Grail. Now Grail’s products are meant to detect cancer at the earliest stages when it’s most susceptible to treatment.
But those products rely heavily on Illumina’s DNA technology, and so to do Grail’s competitors in the eyes of the FTC. If Illumina were to acquire Grail, it would have the incentive to raise prices on those competitors to give Grail an unfair advantage. So the FTC is suing to stop the merger. It’s the second time in about a year that the federal government has stepped in to block Illumina’s attempt to buy another company, and it brings up an existential question for the company: Has it become too big and too powerful to legally expand?
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