Apple vs Samsung like patent war in the genomics industry
Remember the year 2012, when all we could hear from the smartphone industry was the on-going litigation between Apple and Samsung. Well, after a recent move from Illumina, the world’s largest next generation sequencing instrument provider, we can expect 2016 to be a similar year of litigation in the genomics industry. Except that unlike Apple’s opponent Samsung, who were busy selling smartphones around the world, Illumina’s opponent is a young company based in UK, Oxford Nanopore Technologies just venturing out in the real world. To understand, why Illumina would take such a step, we first need to go back in time, where all this began. Back in 2003, with the then available method of sequencing (Sanger Sequencing), it took the researchers 13 years and $2.7 billion to publish the Human Genome. At this rate, sequencing would be the luxury of just a few people on the planet and would eventually die. To harness the potential of the genetics and make the genome “the transformative textbook o…