He also prepared for the company’s next big release: the NovaSeq X, expected to cut the cost of sequencing an entire human genome to as low as $200, down from $150,000 in Illumina’s early years. Icahn didn’t respond in time for publication.)Īs CEO, deSouza focused on further expanding the clinical market-which today accounts for more than half of the company’s revenue, according to one source-and building an overseas presence. (DeSouza declined to comment on the record for the story. Part of deSouza’s mission was to make Illumina’s DNA data bank representative of racial diversity in the U.S. Outside the firm, deSouza used his perch to call attention to the lack of representation in pharma companies and, as a result, racial biases in genomics. Diversity also improved at the firm, with deSouza-of Indian, Ethiopian, and Greek descent-increasing the number of people of color and women in top positions. As president, deSouza successfully expanded the company’s clinical labs business, a market that grew to rival its research enterprise. Icahn himself would later say that deSouza did a “ good job” of running Illumina’s core business, developing and selling the company’s million-dollar genome sequencers. Upon orchestrating Grail’s launch in 2016, Flatley stepped down as Illumina’s CEO, with deSouza replacing him and Flatley becoming executive chairman.Īccording to several people familiar with deSouza’s tenure, the new CEO was an effective leader-at least initially. The startup attracted investments from the deepest pockets, including billionaires like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Microsoft’s Bill Gates, while Illumina held on to a 12% stake. This eureka moment would eventually lead to the Galleri test years after Illumina created and spun off Grail. could identify trace fragments of cancer in certain parts of DNA. The same year that deSouza arrived at Illumina, a pathologist in the company’s prenatal testing business discovered that A.I. At the time, the firm almost exclusively served the research market. The newcomer was tasked with growing the company’s clinical business to boost revenue. The startup that billionaires lovedĭeSouza was a rising star in Silicon Valley when Jay Flatley, Illumina’s then-CEO, recruited him from cybersecurity firm Symantec to become the biotech company’s president in 2013. In the end, however, deSouza’s fate at Illumina may more accurately be seen as a cautionary tale of overzealous CEO ambition, a case where one man’s desire to burnish a lasting image temporarily led one of the country’s most innovative companies astray. DeSouza’s defenders say timing-the rise of aggressive regulators, the decline in biotech stocks-was the real barrier to a successful merger. One could make the argument that many of deSouza’s strategies were not as inexplicable as Icahn claimed at worst, the CEO was overconfident in his ability to dominate a new market opportunity, and, at best, he wanted to save lives by quickly moving Galleri into mainstream medicine. Moreover, biotech, an industry lacking diversity, has lost a champion of inclusion in deSouza. Insiders with a view into the last days of deSouza’s rule at Illumina, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, insist that Icahn’s financial case against the company was watertight and that the leadership problems at Illumina extended beyond the Grail debacle.īut while Icahn takes a victory lap, others warn that the disruption at Illumina has slowed the development and deployment of a potentially lifesaving cancer test, one that’s expected to be a part of President Biden’s “ moonshot” goal to dramatically reduce cancer deaths in the U.S. To Icahn’s supporters, the ouster of deSouza and Thompson, an effort staunchly championed by the billionaire investor, proves the 87-year-old still has relevance decades after he forged the corporate raider model. and EU regulators over whether an Illumina-Grail tie-up would be anticompetitive closed the Grail deal over regulators’ objections lost billions in market value became embroiled in a no-holds-barred proxy battle with the notorious activist investor Carl Icahn and witnessed the eventual defenestration of two of Silicon Valley’s most prominent Black executives: former CEO Francis deSouza and former chairman John Thompson. In the years since, Illumina has tussled with U.S. In 2020, Illumina, the world’s leading maker of whole-genome sequencing machines, announced its intention to acquire the cancer test company for $8 billion. Another holdup: Grail has been stuck in legal limbo for two years. One of the reasons there isn’t wider awareness of Galleri is that insurance companies do not yet cover such hyper-early diagnostic tools. Last year, the California-based biotech firm Grail released a $950 test called Galleri that can identify trace signs of more than 50 types of cancers, including difficult-to-detect pancreatic and ovarian cancers, in the DNA of completely symptom-free people.
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