SAN DIEGO — After quietly raising hundreds of millions of dollars and building a team stacked with genomics pros, Element Biosciences announced on Monday the commercial launch of its new DNA sequencer — and with it, plans to rival industry behemoth Illumina.
In a virtual event featuring the company’s leadership and partner organizations, the biotech boasted that its sequencer, Aviti, has the right blend of affordability, accuracy, and flexibility to disrupt the current sequencing landscape. And the startup’s executives — a number of them Illumina alums — say that’s just the beginning, adding that their technology could be adapted to study RNA, proteins, and cells.