Roche Abandons Takeover of Illumina

Roche's $46.8 billion bid to take over Illumina fell through when Roche allowed it to expire last week after Illumina's shareholders rejected Roche's attempt to appoint its own directors to Illumina's board. Although Roche has been actively pursuing this deal since December last year and agreed to sweeten the offer from $44.50 per share in cash to $51.00 per in the end of March, Roche declined to pursue the company further after the latest rebuff.

Given the trend toward personalized medicine and continued growth of high-throughput next-generation sequencing market, it is likely Roche remains strategically very interested in advanced sequencing. However, in light of new systems recently coming on-line by other next-generation sequencing companies, like Life Technologies' Personal Genome Machine and Oxford Nanopore's MiniOn System in the last few months, perhaps Roche's confidence in the continued dominance of the Illumina platform has slipped a bit. Early reviews of Illumina's new MiSeq sequencer do seem to be quite positive though.  It will be interesting to see what Roche's next move will be.

For more details on the failed takeover, check out the articles on Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.