In February this year, MGI's newly released DNBSEQ-T20×2 ultra-high-throughput sequencer won the champion for global sequencing throughput. In March, MGI won again in the patent dispute over the global gene sequencing giant Illumina. It is reported that on March 30, 2023, the Appeal Committee of the European Patent Office (EPO) announced the oral trial summary of the patent invalidation dispute between Illumina and MGI, which shows that Illumina's EP3002289 patent will be invalidated.

Nowadays, high-throughput sequencing technology has become the mainstream gene sequencing technology in the world, and the high-throughput sequencing technologies of MGI, Illumina, and Thermo Fisher has occupied a major share of the current market. MGI has become the only enterprise in China and the only three in the world that can independently develop and mass-produce clinical high-throughput gene sequencers. In addition, the results of the patent battle between MGI and Illumina also reflect the technical power of MGI.

The continuous alternation and breakthroughs of high-performance gene sequencing products often indicate the leadership of the company's core technology. At the beginning of this year, MGI announced another major achievement in gene sequencing. On February 7, 2023(U.S), MGI officially launched the DNBSEQ-T20×2 (hereinafter referred to as "T20") ultra-high-throughput sequencer, which can complete 50,000 cases of whole genome sequencing per year, making a new record for the throughput of global gene sequencers. Besides, its single case cost of less than $100 has achieved the best scale cost, building a super-scale "super-sequencing factory" for the industry. MGI pointed out in its 2022 financial report released on April 25 that the R&D and production of the gene sequencer business segment of MGI has taken the lead in the industry. MGI now has become one of the only two enterprises worldwide that can independently develop and mass-produce clinical-class gene sequencer of low, medium and high fluxes from Gb to Tb grade.

In fact, as early as a few years ago, the sequencer developed by MGI was not only comparable to the same level of products in the United States, but even surpassed it in some technical dimensions. In 2021, a Korean research team published a research article online in the journal Genes & Genomics, analyzing and comparing the performance in whole-genome sequencing of the two sequencing platforms DNBSEQ-G400 and DNBSEQ-T7 platforms manufactured by MGI and NovaSeq 6000 platform of Illumina. The results confirmed that the performance of each sequencing platform in terms of fragment size distribution, gene coverage rate and expression variation detection is very similar, showing that the performance of MGISEQ-2000 and DNBSEQ-T7 platforms has reached the international leading level.

However, compared with the "new product" NovaSeq X series gene sequencer launched by Illumina last year, MGI's T20 is several times higher than the NovaSeq X series not only in the maximum daily data volume but also in the data output per operation. As for cost, Illumina's NovaSeqX Plus sequencer further reduces the cost of a single human whole genome sequencing to US$200, while MGI's T20 reduces the cost of a single case to less than US$100. It can be clearly seen that in the past few years of competition, MGI's sequencing products have owned unique advantages in the world.

From IPRdaily

April 27th, 2023