With Illumina currently banned from shipping its DNA sequencers into China—in retaliation for the Trump administration’s on-again, off-again tariffs against the country—rival manufacturer PacBio aims to step into the gap.
PacBio said it is solidifying and expanding its distribution agreement with a local company, with plans to grow the footprint of its hi-fi long-read sequencers among both clinical and research labs.
Haorui Gene, based in Xi’an, has previously deployed 10 of PacBio’s Sequel II and Revio sequencers, with a focus on blood typing genomics and HLA testing. Under the new agreement, Haorui Gene will now distribute the recently launched Vega benchtop system across the country while also offering product support.
“This arrangement formalizes a strong foundation and supports our broader goal to make accurate, long-read sequencing standard practice in clinical genomics,” PacBio President and CEO Christian Henry said in a statement.
“Haorui Gene has built deep expertise in one of the most genomically complex areas of medicine. Their leadership in blood group and HLA typing, paired with our HiFi technology, has already delivered real progress in China, making them an ideal partner to help scale access to our highly accurate long-read sequencing technologies across China,” Henry added.
According to PacBio, the company’s long-read approach lends itself well to blood-based genomics, with its ability to parse the full-length genes and polymorphic regions necessary for accurate donor matching and transfusion safety.
Illumina had planned to grow its own manufacturing base within China, with the launch of a reagent production site in greater Shanghai in 2022 that was slated to expand to instruments by 2028.
But, after the U.S. installed its first 10% tariff on Chinese goods in early February, the country placed Illumina on its “unreliable entities list.” The company received an import ban when those duties went up another 10% in early March, though it was allowed to continue operating in the region. Shortly thereafter, Illumina announced a plan to cut about $100 million in global costs.
U.S. tariffs on China later surged to as much as 145%, while China responded with 125% tariffs of its own—before both countries walked back their duties with a 90-day pause starting this month, down to about 30% and 10%, respectively.
PacBio has faced tariff headwinds as well. In early April, the company said it would reduce both head count and spending due to supply chain pressures and cutbacks in U.S. government grant spending for biomedical research.
That includes cutting annualized operating expenses by $45 million to $50 million, alongside a plan to focus resources on pushing its long-read platforms versus its short-read sequencer, the Onso, which launched in 2022 to compete with Illumina’s technology.
Elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region, earlier this month, PacBio announced a collaboration in Thailand to apply whole genome sequencing in newborn DNA screening programs. The company said the project with Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok is the first in the region to explore the use of hi-fi sequencing at population scale.