Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. As I'm sure many of you saw this morning at the Illumina Genomics Forum, we unveiled a number of significant updates on our sequencing technology roadmap. We announced that Chemistry X, now named XLEAP-SBS Chemistry, will be coming to market in a new product line, the NovaSeq X Series. NovaSeq X is the most innovative sequencing platform we have ever developed, providing massive improvements in throughput, scale, accuracy, simplicity and cost. It's also our most sustainable high throughput sequencer ever, enabling greater access as big science becomes green science. To make this possible, we needed more than five years of development and more than 40 patent filings. The innovations of NovaSeq X enable us to deliver even greater sequencing breakthroughs in future phases of our roadmap. We prioritize not only utility, but user experience, and customers noticed.
Early response has been phenomenal, and we're already seeing strong pre-orders. In addition to this breakthrough sequencer, we also announced that in 2024 we will be offering XLEAP-SBS on our flagship benchtop platforms, NextSeq 1000 and 2000. We also shared that we will deliver two products with Illumina Complete Long Reads in 2023. A long read human genome assay will launch in Q1, delivering greater throughput at lower cost. With Illumina Complete Long Reads, we are consistently generating contiguous long reads of six to 7,000 with our longest reads more than 30,000 . In the second half of next year, we will deliver an order of magnitude improvement in throughput with an enrichment panel. In addition, we announced the launch of NovaSeq 6000 DX, which earlier this week completed registration as the first FDA regulated and CE marked high throughput sequencer.
I'm excited to continue to discuss these innovations with you. Joydeep Goswami and Alex Aravanis are here with me to answer questions too. Operator, please go ahead.
Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Again, press star one to ask a question. As a reminder, please limit yourself to one question so that we can accommodate as many analysts as possible. You are welcome to reenter the queue if you have additional questions. We will take our first question from Dan Brennan with TD Cowen. Please go ahead.
Great. Thank you. Thanks. Congrats everyone, obviously on the launch and the years of effort that went into this. I guess I wanted to ask my question on demand elasticity. You know, you're kind of pricing the XLEAP at $200 a genome. That's even more attractive than we would've thought, and certainly we would expect customer interest would be strong. Could you just give us some color, Francis, about that price and, you know, how we think about demand elasticity say across academia and clinical? And kind of with that, you know, if you will, could you discuss, you know, the NovaSeq DX and kind of how that plays into the XLEAP ?
Namely will the DX go to kind of smaller mid-size labs, and do you expect like larger labs, you know, will adopt the XLEAP ? I'm just wondering on elasticity and kind of how you segment the clinical market, given I know during the prepared remarks you discussed comments from, Tempus that were very constructive on XLEAP . Thank you.
Great. Well, thank you Dan, for that question. We expect the NovaSeq X to drive the next wave of elasticity, you know, in both the clinical and research markets, as you said. Some of the comments that I made during the talk help paint that in a little bit. Specifically for example, what we're hearing from research customers is that they're excited about the potential for the X to enable them to tackle complex diseases through much larger cohorts. Specifically diseases like neurological conditions, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, autism, schizophrenia, and also just do much deeper sequencing. X will open up the avenues for research into those areas.
We're also hearing from some customers on the research side that they're gonna use the X as the opportunity to move from offering clinical exome services to offering genome services. And so that's a pretty significant step up in terms of the amount of sequencing that they would need per sample, and that's really only fundamentally enabled by the X. On the clinical side, what we're seeing is, you heard a little bit of that in the remarks this morning too. We're seeing a number of trends sort of playing out. One, in oncology, we're seeing the move from panels to comprehensive genomic profiling, you know, to clinical exomes. That trend will be further accelerated by the X.
We're also seeing, and you heard a little bit of that from the comments from Regeneron earlier, which is the move from exomes to genomes. I think that'll further expand the amount of sequencing needed per sample. We're seeing examples, as you point out, both on the clinical side and the research side, where what we're hearing from the market is that they'll do more sequencing in terms of larger cohorts, they'll do deeper sequencing, they'll push more new modalities like spatial, for example, and single cell sequencing. We expect that at any given customer with an X, that you'll see them do more sequencing after they move to the X than they did before. That's how it played out for us with the NovaSeq as well, the 6000 when we launched it.
That after customers bought a NovaSeq, they ended up doing more sequencing and spending more on sequencing in aggregate than they did before. To the NovaSeq DX, where we're targeting the NovaSeq DX is the clinical applications that need a cleared box. Specifically, for example, oncology testing, where there are many markets around the world where the LDT option just does not exist, and that you can only offer clinical tests by having a cleared product, an end-to-end product. Both the workflow and the sequencer has to be cleared. The NovaSeq DX will be fundamentally enabling, for example, to countries across Europe that need a cleared box and a cleared test, to do things like, you know, comprehensive genomic profiling.
You'll see applications like oncology testing, you'll see genetic disease testing, and other high-throughput clinical applications now being made accessible to countries where it wasn't accessible until they had a cleared high-throughput box. In addition, in the U.S., what you will see is an expansion of the number of labs that are able to offer those tests, because there are a number of labs that are waiting for a cleared workflow that they can stand up before they offer a test. You'll see the emergence of a more distributed environment for markets like oncology testing in the U.S. because of the availability of a cleared high-throughput box and a cleared assay on it.
We will take our next question from Dan Arias with Stifel. Your line is open.
Good afternoon, guys. Thanks for the questions. Francis, maybe just on the X system, when will it be broadly available? What is the ASP there? If I go back to the HiSeq X launch and your commercialization of a $1,000 genome, I remember you guys being helpful with an equation that kind of put some assumptions around reagent price per run, genomes per run, and then sort of an upfront extraction sample prep assumption and a depreciation assumption that essentially helps us with understanding where the cost components come from for a $1,000 genome. I was hoping you could maybe do that for a $200 genome.
Sure. Let me start with the availability. The NovaSeq X Plus, we announced to both of them today, we will be shipping the NovaSeq X Plus in Q1 of next year, so late Q1. We'll be ramping up production over the course of 2023. The NovaSeq X will ship in the second half of the year, and we'll also be ramping production up over the course of that year. What you can expect is, as we've done with our other launches, you know, we're taking orders. We've started taking orders already, so we're taking orders now. We'll start shipping against those orders in Q1. Initially, we'll be building a backlog of orders, and then we'll be working to ramp up production.
By the end of the year on the X Plus, on a run rate basis, we should be able to fulfill demand coming in. That's how we're thinking about, you know, that's how we're looking to ship the products. In terms of pricing, the NovaSeq X Plus will be priced at $1.25 million for the machine, and the NovaSeq X will be $985 for the machine. Yeah. No, I think that's right. That's the list price, and it's $985,000 for the NovaSeq X base model.
We'll take our next question from Julia Qin with JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Hi, thanks for taking the question, and congrats on the new launches. Just on Chemistry X backward compatibility, what would the cost per gig look like on NextSeq? Should we be thinking about a similar three-fold reduction or roughly, you know, $5-$6 per gig? Could you maybe talk about the rationale of choosing that early 2024 timeframe for backward compatibility rather than, you know, anytime sooner or anytime later? Thanks.
Sure. Thank you, Julia. We haven't announced yet the pricing associated with Chemistry X or XLEAP-SBS on NextSeq 1000, 2000. Stay tuned as we work through that development process and get closer to launch, we will be announcing the pricing. But you absolutely should expect improvements in pricing and also in the other aspects of the performance on NextSeq 1000, 2000. On that part of the question, stay tuned. In terms of how we prioritized, we needed to prioritize. We couldn't get both out at the same time, so we wanted to think through what the market need was.
What we heard from the market very clearly was that there was a real need on the high throughput side around customers wanting to embark on much, much bigger experiments, and that they were gated by the accessibility of the price points to enable those big experiments I was talking about in neurological conditions and cardiovascular and spatial and so on. The way we thought about it is sort of market back, which is, you know, what was the market need right now, and where was the big opportunity? There we felt that it was clearly on the high throughput side of the market. We felt the need would emerge on the mid-throughput side, so there would be a need, but it would be a little bit further out.
That's how we made the decision around, you know, making the NovaSeq X first, and then making it available on the NextSeq 1000 and NextSeq 2000.
We will take our next question from Derik De Bruin with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks for taking my question. How should we think about the cost of goods and margins associated with this? I mean, one would expect that your.
You know, some of the packaging and some of the stuff you're doing is gonna remove the cogs, but also you've got more powerful cameras and stuff. How should we think about margins? How should we think the gross margins on this? I guess, what's your capacity in terms of being able to build the number of instruments for next year? I think that's one. If you're not gonna ship until the second half of 2023, then how should we think about demand for the core business? Does this sort of like freeze up your market for the rest of, you know, for the rest of the installed base until people sort of see what's out there? Just some things to help us think about the dynamics of this. Thanks. I know I shoved a lot in.
Hey, Derik, no worries. All right, let me start. First of all, we're shipping in Q1 of 2023, it's important to know that we're not waiting to the second half. That's for just the X, but the X Plus, which is the flagship one, ships in Q1, and we're taking orders right now. In terms of freezing the market, what we expect to happen and what we're hearing already from our customers is the customers that are running production environments, which our customers are, whether they're on the clinical side or the research side, they're gonna continue running with the machines they have for the majority of their production samples.
They're going to acquire an X as quickly as they can to understand, you know, the profiles, to get familiar with it, to validate workflows, and that it'll be more of a tapered cut over. Even the most aggressive labs, you know, the ones that push the envelope the most, are gonna continue on NovaSeq 6000 at least until the back half of next year before, and then they're gonna start sort of tapering over, you know, their fleet production loads. We expect, you know, people to continue to use their NovaSeqs to buy their 6000s even as they look to ramp up on the X.
In terms of margins, you know, our philosophy has always been, you know, to put price points into the market, once we have the innovations that allow us to maintain our margins. You know, that's candidly the work we've been doing over the last five years from a product development perspective. The innovations, the breakthrough innovations that Alex talked about really enable us to drive our cost of goods sold down and then pass that to the market. That's how we're able to deliver these price points, not only at a sustainable model, but in a way that's good for our margins and healthy for our margins. That's been our philosophy now for a very long time and continues to be our philosophy.
In terms of capacity, we're ramping up our manufacturing capacity now. As I said, we're taking orders now. We start shipping in Q1. We expect demand to exceed capacity for a while, so going into next year. But as we exit next year, we expect our manufacturing capacity to match our demand, and so we expect to be in that position as we exit next year. I think I covered all the parts of your question. If I missed anything.
Yeah, I think you hit it, Francis. Maybe the only thing I'll add, Derik, in there is, you know, we have traditionally, every time we've introduced a new platform, we've had trade-in promos and other combo promos that ease the cycle, right, as customers bring on new instruments or wait for new instruments that, you know, they don't have to choose between getting one immediately and you know, continuing to use the previous platform. Expect those to continue and smooth out the cycle.
Um-
We will take our
Hey, Derik. Hi, Derik. I was just gonna add a couple points there. One is we talked about our manufacturing facilities. We've insourced almost everything now on the flow cells, the consumables, the chemistry, and that allows us to control prices even more, right, and really be master of our own destinies about scale. You know, because we have the scale, we can make those investments over time. That's also significant. Then I just wanna emphasize, as Francis said, you know, you can lower prices, but it's really around innovating so we can lower prices and do the great comparable margins to the past, right, and then pass that on. If you look at the flow cell that Francis had on stage, it's actually smaller than the existing 6,000 , but it has three times the output.
That's a very concrete example of innovation, right? Going to the higher density, having the new chemistry, which allows us to do that, and the optics and so on.
We will take our next question from Tejas Savant with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.
Hey, guys. Good morning, and congrats on all the new logos this morning. Francis, a couple of questions from me. One on Chemistry X. Did you share how you are thinking about sort of the read lengths that you expect to generate here given the higher stability? On the Infinity piece, can you just help us contextualize what should be the price per genome once you launch that whole human genome assay in the first quarter? How does that stack up versus the $1,000 or perhaps less that some of the native long-read approaches are targeting here? Finally, on the ambient shipping point, I feel like that's sort of underappreciated a little bit by the investment community, but could really help democratize adoption here.
Walk us through how you're thinking about that?
Maybe I'll start with the Ambion point, and I'll turn it over to Alex since I have him here for the other parts of your question, Tejas. Tate, you're absolutely right on both fronts. The Ambion ship is a big deal that I think is gonna be underestimated for a little while in the sense that, you know, not needing dry ice or a cold chain for supply is a major step forward in a number of ways. One, even in the U.S. for existing customers, it is a big burden to have to deal with a shipment when it comes in.
I don't know if you've ever been at the loading docks at these labs, but it's a big deal for them, and they have a lot of people working on it, a lot of people sort of, you know, disposing of the dry ice. It's a time-consuming process. From an experience perspective and from a, you know, delivering superior value compared to anyone else, it's a big step forward to say you don't need that anymore. Also, increasingly, we're hearing from our customers that they have their own sustainability agendas, whether it's SDP goals that they're trying to hit or just values associated with their organizations, that they really are pushing their vendors to continue to be more sustainable.
I think this positions us very well in being aligned with the values of the communities that we serve. I think, again, competitively, that's gonna be, you know, appreciated by customers and potential customers. The other point you make is also very important, which is it opens up new markets. There are countries where you don't have a reliable cold chain, and that has been a gating factor. By not requiring it, we're suddenly enabling those countries now to get access to high-throughput sequencing. I think that's gonna be a really exciting thing for customers that we have in some countries that have frankly struggled with it or frankly just not been able to do high-throughput sequencing at all. To your point, I think it's a big step.
I think it's a little underappreciated, but it's an important step forward.
All right, I just on the Ambion ship, I had two customers come up to me after the session in tears about how incredible they are, the Ambion ship is, and how much it means to their organization and how much it means that they won't have to be throwing all this stuff into landfills anymore. Again, I wanna emphasize a technical point, which is it's impossible to do that with the old chemistry. The chemistry that other people have copied and so on, it's just a physical and chemical impossibility. I can't emphasize enough how hard that was to do and the just incredible customer feedback around that very differentiated capability. You asked about read lengths.
At launch, the read lengths will be two by 150, which addresses the vast majority of customer needs today. We've been testing it in our laboratory, and because of stability, it has a lot of potential to go to longer. Absolutely on our roadmap to have future kits with longer read lengths, like we've done with some lower throughput systems, but really wanna bring that to the higher throughput, which is even harder to do. We haven't talked about that roadmap yet, but you know, 100% committed to it, and the chemistry is enabling for that. Regarding Infinity at launch will be lower cost than any to do a whole genome than any legacy kind of long-read, you know, technology.
We think they'll be attractive there. It gets really attractive with the enrichment kit, right? You know, our standard PCR-free genome, right, especially on NovaSeq X is, I mean, is gonna be, you know, is the highest performance now of any genome. Adding to that, select targeted regions with Illumina Complete Long Reads, I'll use the brand name now, you know, for just a fraction of the cost of having to do it on the whole genome, that combination price point will be dramatically lower than we think any long read technology could offer.
We will take our next question from Puneet Souda with SVB Securities. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi, Francis, Alex, and Joseph. Thanks for taking the question. First one is really on actual runtime and turnaround time for the NovaSeq X Plus, fully loaded. I mean, you mentioned one day, so I just wanted to make sure how that compares to the 40 hours or so for a NovaSeq S4 run. On the gross margin point, I mean, you have 90% reduction in packing, you have smaller flow cells, faster reads, lower volume of reagents. Actually, has the gross margin improved here at scale, or is it the same given the cost per gigabase of $2 per gigabase? Then lastly, you know, I have to say, you know, quite an impressive conference that you have put together.
I mean, you've really managed to get multiple, genomics stakeholders and multiple end markets under one roof, which is, impossible to do at, industry conferences. Again, great to see that. Should we expect this to be an annual event now?
Thank you, Puneet. Maybe I'll start with the last one. Say, yeah, thank you. We are honored and grateful and excited about how this conference is playing out. As we said, it got sold out, and so we had many more customers and partners that wanted to attend than we could even hold. We're over 1,000 in person. We have, I think, over 10,000 online listening into the innovation roadmap. Just a huge outpouring of interest from the community. You've heard me say for several years now that I want to launch products in front of customers, and not maybe at investor conferences.
For me, it's been a personal goal to create this community 'cause I heard from our customers that there's a huge demand for it. In addition, the quality of the sessions are phenomenal. We have a community here, there's a lot of knowledge sharing happening from peers, from health systems, from researchers around how to roll out sequencing at scale. We've been very fortunate to have ministers of health, head of health systems, and I have no doubt that we'll emerge from this conference with people having ways to accelerate the use of genomics, whether it's in clinical environments or in research environments. With that, I'll turn it over to Alex on the other two.
All right. Thanks, Puneet. Regarding the run times. Let's go through it step by step. With the initial 10 billion read flow cell, right, that's a single day run. Now, that compares to the highest output NovaSeq 6000 flow cell just in terms of raw output, which is two days. It really is twice as fast with all the cost reductions with the DRAGEN onboard analysis. With the higher output flow cell, right, the 25 billion read flow cell, that's a two-day run, right? That's comparable to the current NovaSeq 6000 , except you get three times the output and obviously very significant cost reductions, and all of the analysis on board and including some of the additional workflow automation.
Kind of across the board, twice as fast, you know, compared to the same run times and then at, you know, triple the output, which there is nothing to compare to, you know, two days.
On the gross margin, Puneet, I think, you know, as Alex had mentioned, right, we have innovated our technology to be able to create a new SCS that allows us to, you know, reduce prices that customers are expecting. We will maintain our overall company gross margins at the ranges that we have traditionally done. That's probably the guidance I'll give.
We will take our next question from Vijay Kumar with Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Maybe Francis, my first one for you. I know price elasticity of demand, that comes up a lot. You know, with the price points that we're looking at now, $200 per genome, is that available to all customers or do they need to commit to a certain amount of volume? Just in general, talk about the demand picture, right? What the new system does because historically when you had these systems come up, we've seen volumes go up. Where are those volumes coming from now? What kind of work have you guys done to understand that the market can support these price points?
Sure. Let me start with the, you know, the price point itself. As you know, in our instruments, customers can buy a range of flow cells with a range of outputs, and that gives them access to different price points. There'll be customers that can get access to the $2 per G retail price, but there'll be customers who, if they choose a lower output flow cell, will be paying more than $2 per G. You know, there'll be a range there, and it'll depend. Customers will make the choice where on that spectrum they wanna be, depending on the output per flow cell that they want. This is available to them. Again, they can do lower output at a slightly higher price per G.
It's been, you know, five years since we launched the NovaSeq 6000, and we've spent a lot of time talking to our customers about the elasticity of their demand and, you know, what they were looking to do with the next range of samples would be and where the demand for sequencing could be. What we've heard, you know, really loudly again, is that there are entire areas of research that are waiting for a lower price point so they can do the large experiments that they need in areas, again, like the neurological conditions, neurodegenerative conditions, things like Alzheimer's, Autism, Schizophrenia, Parkinson's.
We've also heard from a research perspective that there's a keen interest in going to a spatial and more single cell to understand, for example, the heterogeneity of tumors. Again, to get to the scale they wanted, they were waiting for lower price points. Similarly, there's on the clinical side a keen interest to move to deeper sequencing. You know, we have panel vendors that are looking to go to comprehensive genomic profiling. There are other vendors that are looking to go to clinical exomes and genomes. We have customers that have been using exomes for a while but understand that there is more utility from genomes and have been waiting for a price point that switch makes sense.
Now, it'll still result in their spending more per sample or doing more, obviously doing a lot more sequencing per sample too, but the price points now make sense for them to consider that move. We spent years, you know, talking to our customers and assessing where their demand was, and so that's what drove the price points that we put out onto the market today.
We will take our next question from David Westenberg with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you for taking the question. I know that this is kind of a little bit of a repeat from the other few, and I wanna maybe, like, focus specifically on those high throughput filling up on NovaSeq kinda customers, you know, the Guardant, the Foundation Medicine, the Caris, because it's becoming an increasingly gigantic portion of your overall portfolio. Can you talk about the expected roadmap in terms of spending, you know, and let's just say, you know, like a Guardant is like a $50 million customer.
Is this one of those things where they're clinically sequencing, you know, the $50 million run rate, they buy the X, their sequencing, you know, goes on while it's validating, and then they do a price reduction, and then you expect it to grow off that base? Or is this one of the things where you expect those customers just to have a continued growth pathway and no kind of starts and stops in the way they're looking at the way that they spend?
Just really quickly on opening up new projects on the academic side, have you talked to any countries or health systems where a lower price of sequencing, you know, starts to open up, you know, the $10 million kind of population price point or entire population of larger kind of customers? I'll stop there.
Yeah, great questions on both. On the first one, we expect, and what we're hearing from customers is that the path will look similar to what we saw before, which is, look, while there may be variances on individual customers, overall, what we saw before is that, you know, in aggregate, customers continued to grow their spend on sequencing, even as they transitioned to a higher platform. The way it played out was customers continued to run their production environments on their existing platforms. In this case, for example, a NovaSeq 6000. They would buy an X. They would, you know, start to use the X, validate their workflows, start to taper, you know, sequencing production from their existing instruments to the new instruments.
On the new instruments, for example, they could look to do deeper sequencing per sample, and they'd use that transition opportunity as an opportunity to move from, you know, panels to exomes or exomes to genomes, and they would validate their new workflows on the new sequencing paradigm that they are on. We saw that play out again as customers moved, you know, to the NovaSeq six thousand, and that's what we're hearing. Similarly, on the research side, we expect customers to design bigger experiments and therefore continue to expand their sequencing spend with us even as they get much more data for that sequencing spend. So that's how we expect it to play out. Again, in the aggregate.
There'll be individual customers, you know, that you know, it may not be quite that monotonic, but in aggregate, we expect it to play out that way. Then you're absolutely right. There are countries and health systems and applications that become accessible because of the lower price point. There are countries which say that, look, they'd love to do oncology testing, but it's not accessible to them at the price points that exist today, especially because in some countries, not all the personalized therapy drugs are available. They're saying, "Look, the utility isn't the same.
If it was a lower price point, we'd absolutely do it." Then there are applications like newborn screening in some countries that are gaining traction but require a price point along the lines of what's offered by an X for it to actually make sense in a health system. Those are a couple of examples of, you know, countries or applications and health systems that are now enabled.
David, maybe just on the elasticity thing. There are three large buckets that Francis talked about, right? We do expect that both because of price, but also because of technology and science moving forward here, we do expect growth in samples and continued growth in samples. That's one. The second element is people are doing more assays on those samples per sample, right? If you think about multi-omics, you move from just looking at the DNA to looking at DNA and RNA or DNA, RNA plus proteins. You have an expansion there. Then the third element is because of the types of things you're doing on it, you're sequencing deeper, so it becomes higher intensity. Even per assay, you require more sequencing per assay.
The combination of those three elements, driven by price, but also driven by our innovations, really contributes to the overall elasticity of the market that we expect.
Yeah. I'll just add, for example, a concrete example since you brought up Guardant, right? Their first gene panel for liquid biopsy was about 60 genes. If you look at the product they just launched, their GuardantINFINITY assay, that's 800 genes. It's gone up a lot, right? Part of the reason they're able to do that and develop new products and go to that kind of roadmap is with the innovations like things like NovaSeq X. We fully expect that, you know, and this is not specific to them, but they can now think about maybe that could become their standard assay in the future, right? Why not go to whole exome?
This concludes today's question and answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back to Salli Schwartz for any additional or closing remarks.
Thank you. We're so pleased to have you join us on this momentous day, not only for Illumina, but for genomics. A replay of this call will be available at investor.illumina.com. This concludes our call, and we look forward to seeing you at our Investor Day on Monday.
This concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect.