Illumina and Their Fight Against Covid

What's going on with Vestact recommended stock Illumina? Bright did cover their first quarter numbers on the 6th of May, which were solid enough although the management team sounded anxious and withdrew earnings guidance for the rest of 2020. Since then the stock price is up a heart-warming 20%!

You will recall that Illumina makes genetic sequencing machines and the consumables that they use when performing analysis of human DNA and other genetic material. Their top customers are companies like 23andMe and Ancestry, which are consumer-facing services that allow one to send in saliva or another sample to get tested.

One reason for the stock price uptick could be that these companies are all collaborating on major Covid-19 genetic studies. Researchers are probing DNA in search of clues about why some Covid-19 patients get so much sicker than others.



23andMe is recruiting 10 000 people who were hospitalised with Covid-19 and then analysing their DNA closely. This is what is called a genome-wide association study, where the genetic data of lots of people is mined in an attempt to discover useful correlations. In the past, 23andMe has provided genetic data for studies on depression and bipolar disease, lupus, inflammatory bowel disease, and Parkinson's disease.

Ancestry has its own study going on where it is surveying 250 000 existing customers to find those who later tested positive for Covid-19 and were hospitalised with the disease, then digging deeper into those customers' data.

If this sounds interesting and you want to do some more reading on the topic, go here: COVID-19 host genetics initiative.