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Illumina CFO on using genome tech to beat pandemic
Sam Samad, finance leader of the biotech group, reveals the importance of taking big decisions critical to defeating the coronavirus outbreak by Lawrie Holmes - February 4, 2021
From the start of the coronavirus outbreak, technology from Illumina has been at work helping defeat the pandemic. As a result of two Chinese university teams using the US biotech’s sequencing equipment, the genome (or genetical material) of the coronavirus was published on January 10, 2020 and vaccines from Oxford University/AstraZeneca, Moderna and Pfizer-BioNtech vaccines were designed within days of this blueprint being revealed.
The latter two are the world’s first genome-based vaccines and have been developed without the companies ever needing to have the virus on site. “Sequencing is instrumental to understanding not only the make-up of the virus, but its epidemiology, how it mutates, how it evolves, and also to develop a vaccine for it,�