Illumina Enters Into Prenatal Testing Pact With Chinese Firm

Illumina has entered into a collaboration with a Chinese company to bring molecular reproductive health testing to the world's most populous country.

The pact between the San Diego-based Illumina and Beijing-based Annoroad will lead to the development of prenatal DNA tests in China. Illumina will provide next-generation sequencing testing platforms and reagents, while Annoroad will provide nucleic acid extraction, library preparation, and data analysis software. Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.

"Non-invasive prenatal testing is used widely in the reproductive health arena, and we hope to promote it as a standard practice in hospitals," said Junbin Liang, Annoroad's founder and chief executive officer, in a statement. "Cooperation between our two companies will provide additional high-quality diagnostic solutions in the field of reproductive health." The pact is one of many recently announced between U.S. laboratories and Chinese companies. "Particularly in China, healthcare providers are working hard to promote the clinical application of genomic technology. Evidently, non-invasive prenatal testing has now gained wide popularity in the reproductive health space," stock research firm Zacks recently wrote about the Illumina-Annoroad pact. "We believe the aforementioned collaboration will help Illumina, which in itself is one of the leading sequencing companies globally, capture a larger share of this multi-billion dollar market, going forward." It maintained a strong buy rating for Illumina stock, which has been up about 20 percent over the past year.

Takeaway: Illumina is one of many laboratory firms creating deals to enter the Chinese market.