Genomics giant Illumina to boost Singapore headcount by 25%, doubles down on local R&D
US-based company is developing next-generation sequencers, using AI models in the Republic to speed up diagnostics and lower healthcare costs
[SINGAPORE] Life sciences player Illumina is set to grow its 1,700-strong headcount in Singapore by around 20 to 25 per cent over the next five years.
Illumina chief financial officer Ankur Dhingra told The Business Times in an exclusive interview that the roles will be spread across manufacturing and research and development (R&D) teams in areas such as multi-omics, chemistry, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI).
“We have very significant expansion plans in Singapore,” Dhingra said. “Our global manufacturing centre of excellence resides here in Singapore. Several hundreds more people will be added into our manufacturing and core R&D teams, and we’ll build new centres of excellence too.”
Since establishing its first facility in Singapore in 2008 with just 10 employees, the local operations of the US-based genomics giant have become a linchpin in the company’s global strategy.
Singapore in fact accounts for a staggering 60 per cent of Illumina’s global product revenue.
Illumina was cited by Prime Minister Lawrence Wong during the Budget 2025 speech, as an example of how high-quality investments in technology can spur economic opportunity for other local enterprises.
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The planned expansion builds on a US$2.5 billion investment over the past 17 years, which has transformed its Woodlands manufacturing facility into the company’s designated global manufacturing centre of excellence.
“Our Singapore hub is a crown jewel of the company,” said Dhingra.
The Singapore site’s success is built on a trifecta of a strong talent ecosystem, a predictable and business-friendly environment and the nation’s robust relationships across the Asia-Pacific region, Dhingra tells BT. This has allowed the Singapore site to become Illumina’s only facility worldwide that manufactures its full suite of products.
The company has also developed partnerships with universities in Singapore as part of its talent strategy, within which the company has helped design specific curricula and strategies for future skill requirements, such as genetic counselling, bioinformatics and the application of AI in biology.
Dhingra believes that tertiary educational institutions in the Republic take an impact-driven view on science education, closely aligning with the mission of the company to accelerate customer-centric advances and expand the access to advanced technology.
He said: “Singapore as a country is one of the leading countries in undertaking the question: How do we use these technologies for the advancement of healthcare, more than anything else?
“When you invest in your talent with that (perspective), people see that (this work) impacts lives, and that allows us to both attract and retain talent.”
Successes
Last year, Illumina launched its most advanced desktop sequencer, the MiSeq i100, primarily developed and manufactured at the Singapore site in collaboration with the company’s global R&D team.
The product is now being used to develop targeted tests for infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and sepsis.
Dhingra explains its significance and impact to human health: “The instrument can complete an end-to-end sequence run in under seven hours. Seven hours (may feel) like a long time. But today, if somebody goes in for a complicated diagnostic test, it (still) takes days to get the results back. If you are in surgery, or if you’re a newborn that needs a test, a few days can be really long.”
He added: “So we’re envisioning a technology set that can be deployed within the hospital, where, if you run a diagnostic test, it can actually run overnight and the next morning you have the answer. You get the answer sooner, the doctor is able to intervene sooner, the outcomes for the patient are significantly better, while maintaining really high-quality standards. Those are the kind of vectors that we’re working on.”
Illumina is working with its partners to design a complete end-to-end workflow for the product, so as to deploy it at scale within the country.
Further, Dhingra explains that historically, sequencing has required the reagents used to be stored in refrigerators and shipped with ice. With its product, however, Illumina has developed it such that the reagents can be shipped and stored at room temperature.
He elaborates on its impact: “When you are out in the field in a remote city, and your infrastructure is limited, you still have to treat people impacted by infections.
“By taking away that requirement for cold storage, it is easier for small hospitals to improve their capability of managing infections.”
He added: “Our business model has been that we improve the technology such that it becomes more and more accessible.”
In this vein, the cost of sequencing has also been progressively reduced. Over 20 years, the cost to sequence a human genome has dropped from tens of thousands of dollars to less than US$200.
Investing more in R&D
Dhingra tells BT that there are more products developed in Singapore coming out early next year, including one that is especially helpful in the early detection of cancer.
A new method designed to simplify next-generation sequencing workflows and provide more comprehensive genomic insights, called constellation mapped read technology, is also expected to be available in the first half of 2026.
The company is now also leveraging its Singapore R&D ecosystem to perform large-scale biological analysis to generate massive datasets for training advanced AI models.
“The technologies that we are developing allow us to perform experiments at, say, a billion cells at a time. That’s a scale at which things have not happened in human research in the past,” Dhingra said.
“That gives us large biological data sets to train AI models on, in a manner that, again, hasn’t happened in the past,” he added.
Dhingra said that Illumina invests about 20 per cent of its revenue back into R&D.
“I anticipate that we will continue to invest heavily in innovation, because there’s still a lot of development that needs to happen.”
The company currently generates around 70 per cent gross margins globally.
“We’ve set a goal to expand our margins by about 500 basis points, and we’re making good progress towards that.”
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