On the heels of the March completion of Chinese giant BGI-Shenzhen’s $117.6 million acquisition of sequencing service provider Complete Genomics (Mountain View, Calif.), Thermo Fisher Scientific (Waltham, Mass.) announced in mid-April it entered into a definitive agreement to buy Life Technologies (Carlsbad, Calif.), the maker of the Ion Torrent next-generation sequencing (NGS) instruments, for $13.6 billion in cash ($76 per share) plus the assumption of approximately $2.2 billion of debt. Taken together the acquisitions represent a strengthening of dominant positions in the emerging clinical sequencing space by two companies counting on adoption of NGS to drive long-term growth. Onlookers can’t help but wonder what these acquisitions mean for the remaining major U.S. players in the sequencing space—Illumina (San Diego) and Pacific Biosciences (Melo Park, Calif.)—as well as whether Roche (Switzerland) or other large diagnostics players will take notice and seek entry into the market. “The strategic rationale for the acquisition is clear,” says Charlie Miller, an analyst at Morningstar who follows Thermo Fisher. “Thermo can expand its already robust product portfolio and will be able to use its massive customer channels to drive revenue and cost synergies. As a better operator, we expect that Thermo will be able to reinvigorate […]