Isis Spin-out Oxford Nanopore Announces USB-sized DNA Reader

21st February 2012

Isis spin-out Oxford Nanopore has announced its novel nanopore DNA ‘strand sequencing’ method on its GridION platform for the first time and has also presented ‘MinION’ – a sequencer that is the size of a USB memory stick that is expected to retail at less than $900.

The company made the announcements at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conference in Florida, US.

Oxford Nanopore was spun out by Isis in 2005 – raising £0.5m from seed investors. It was founded on nanopore research from Professor Hagan Bayley’s group at Oxford’s Department of Chemistry. London’s IP Group (LSE: IPO) was a founding investor.

Clive G Brown, Chief Technology Officer at Oxford Nanopore, outlined the Company’s pathway to a commercial product with highly disruptive features including ultra long read lengths, high throughput on electronic systems and real-time sequencing results. Oxford Nanopore intends to commercialise GridION and MinION directly to customers within 2012.

For more detail, please see the articles in Nature and the The Financial Times.

Professor Hagan Bayley spoke about his latest research at the December 2011 meeting of the Oxford University Innovation Society and a feature article covering this talk will appear in the Spring 2012 edition of Isis Insights.

Press release sign up