Francis deSouza
Chief Executive Officer at Illumina
Thank you. Sally. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm excited to share with you how our commitment to innovation is driving growth and unlocking the power of the genome. My comments will cover a few key areas. Starting with our strong finish and exceptional results for 2021 followed by how our platforms and markets drove those results. I'll then conclude by highlighting a few of the many trends that will support our momentum and continued growth in 2022 and beyond. Let's start with our financial results for both the fourth quarter and full-year 2021.
Fourth quarter revenue of approximately $1.2 billion increased 26% year-over-year with strong growth across both instruments and consumables and across all-region. Full-year 2021 revenue of more than $4.5 billion dollars increased 40% year-over-year. Reflecting 76% growth in sequencing instruments and 43% growth in sequencing consumables. We're seeing record demand for our instruments across the throughput spectrum and across geographies. In 2021, we shipped more than 3,200 sequencing instrument, and added more than 930 new instrument customers.
Over 50% more than in 2020 or 2019 delving now into each of our platforms, starting with high throughput. We shipped 384 NovaSeq units in 2021 with more than one-third of those instruments for oncology testing approximately 50% of NovaSeq orders in 2021, were to new to high-throughput or new to Illumina customers. 2021 NovaSeq consumable pull through of more than $1.3 million per instrument was the highest ever average even with over double the placements compared to last year. Moving to mid-throughput in 2021, we shipped more than 1,100 NextSeq system, surpassing a 1,000 for the first time and nearly doubling 2020 shipments.
This volume was driven by growing NextSeq 550 demand in clinical applications like oncology testing and reproductive health. As well as NextSeq 1000, 2000 demand as customers expand into multiomic application. More than 20% of NextSeq 1000 and 2000 units this year were placed with new to Illumina customers as we continue to see new customers using higher throughput application. For low throughput in 2021, we shipped more than 1,600 units, another record.
Driven in part by the addition of more than 700 new customers. Looking at our continued strong growth through the lens of our market. Our clinical markets currently include testing for oncology, reproductive health and genetic disease. In 2021 our consumable shipments to clinical markets grew 42%, driven in particular by oncology testing where many customers are building out Comprehensive Genomic Profiling or CGP in expanding into liquid biopsy and monitoring.
We continue to see expanding opportunities for our oncology products globally, including new studies launching in Europe and Asia with our research use only TruSight Oncology 500 assay, for example, our recent joint research project with the National Cancer Center, Japan will develop personalized cancer treatments for patients with Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma, a cancer that occurs more frequently in Asia and our partnership with the Jean Perrin Center at the Clermont-Ferrand University Hospital in France, we'll assess the clinical value of CGP in patients with late-stage disease, compared to the current standard of care.
Also in oncology GRAIL continues to see strong momentum. GRAIL launched the Galleri test last year as the first clinically validated multi-cancer early detection test to be available to patients and providers. Galleri can detect more than 50 types of cancer, most of which have no current screening. It's great to see the initial market reception with multiple large employers and payers adopting Galleri and more than 1,500 prescribing partners, including participation from leading health systems like the NHS, the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic.
The team continues to collaborate with pharmaceutical partners like AstraZeneca, Amgen and Bristol Myers Squibb on potential new innovations in the post-diagnostic space. Finally, the recent initiatives launched in the U.S. and EU to beat cancer are very encouraging. The U.S.' Cancer Moonshot national initiative and Europe's Beating Cancer Plan highlight the increasing recognition of early detection as a critical component in the fight against cancer. Illumina is deeply committed to supporting all early detection oncology testing and treatment initiatives to improve care and save lives. Beyond oncology, reproductive health also had a strong year in 2021.
This was driven in part by a revised American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists or ACOG guidelines enabling genetic testing coverage for all U.S. pregnancies as well as increasing adoption of our VeriSeq NIPT v2 product globally. Our third clinical market genetic disease testing saw tremendous growth and additional evidence generation in 2021 with significant publications in both the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA Pediatrics affirming the clinical utility of whole-genome sequencing or WGS for critically ill children. In 2022, we are already seeing an increase in coverage, with California, Oregon and Maryland Medicaid initiating coverage for WGS in the NICU setting. Expansion of programs for WGS and NICU settings are also occurring globally.
Including our recent project with Germany's Hannover Medical School to implement the use of WGS in NICU patient. This program contributes to a growing body of evidence from other countries, including the United Kingdom and Australia, as well as in states across the U.S. showing the WGS offer significant benefits for diagnosis of genetic disease and critically ill infants along with cost efficiencies for health systems. Turning to our Research and Applied Markets, consumables grew 43% in 2021, driven by projects like All of Us.
Along with ongoing COVID surveillance effort that contributed approximately $220 million in total revenue. I'd now like to spend a few minutes on three key trends that will drive long-term growth. First is the continued deepening and expansion of Illumina's addressable market. We're seeing further penetration of our existing markets through increased access and adoption the use of sequencing is proliferating globally across applications and new initiatives continue to integrate genomics international healthcare system.
Our technology and genomics expertise, are enabling programs like our future health the UK's largest ever Health Research program that will deliver genetic analysis of DNA samples from up to 5 million volunteers. This data will be used for a variety of potential discoveries, including new signals to detect diseases earlier. New ways to better predict high-risk population for diseases and new personalized therapies are tools to delayed diseases or change the course of their progression. We're excited to play a role in this project as the genotyping partner for that program. We also continue to support a growing global COVID surveillance network that will extend to broader pan pathogen and genomic epidemiology work this infrastructure is already being used the study other infectious diseases.
For example in South Africa. Dr. Tulio de Oliveira at CERI, the Center for Epidemic Response and Innovation is using their fleet of sequencers to study other communicable diseases like HIV and malaria. We expect additional opportunities for epidemiology applications in the future as global funding for pathogen surveillance and research expands.
And new sequencing applications and opportunities are growing and evolving rapidly including in multiple nascent spaces like multiomics and drug development. We're supporting the spectrum of multiomic applications across our instruments including proteomics where our co-development partnership with SomaLogic is off to a strong start. We're also catalyzing growth in drug discovery where genomic-based methods can dramatically improve speed to market, success rates, and cost.
In addition to our partnership with Nashville Biosciences, we're collaborating with The Montreal Neurological Institute hospital, Takeda, and Roche to enable large-scale analysis of patient data, and identify promising targets for drug development in neurological diseases. Programs like Our Future Health, growing applications, and increasing global access will support long-term adoption of NGS. The new markets we're opening like drug discovery will further enable adoption while also improving data equity and the integration of genomics into healthcare. We're experiencing this increasing demand for genomics as we enter 2022 with our instrument backlog almost twice the size it was entering 2021.
A second trend is the multifaceted growth in our customer base. Our existing customers are growing their instruments fleet. We're also seeing increasing numbers of customers new to Illumina. As a result, our installed base has grown to more than 20,000 instruments at the end of 2021.
A third trend is the demand for even greater data generation. In 2021, an average Illumina high-throughput customer generated approximately 4 times more data than in 2017. This will continue as customers need more complete genomic information and as NGS become standard in clinical setting. These shifts will increase the number of projects, number of samples per project, and the depth of sequencing per sample as multiple tests are run per patient and as samples are used to read across high-intensity applications like multiomics.
This demand for higher throughput sequencing will in turn continue to drive further growth in our sequencing consumables revenue. For 2021 between our consumables and services, more than 80% of our revenue is recurring in nature. This more predictable and profitable revenue stream provides a tremendous base to invest into the business and drive future growth. Illumina's 2021 performance and significant momentum entering 2022 demonstrate our strong position to support our customers and partners as these trends accelerate genomics in healthcare.
I'll now turn the call over to Sam to highlight additional details on our results and operations as well as discuss our guidance for 2022. Sam?