Oxford Nanopore Raises Another $41 Million for GridION Platform

By Bio-IT World Staff 

April 26, 2011 | Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT), the British biotech firm developing a promising nanopore method of next-generation DNA sequencing (NGS), has raised a further £25 million ($41 million) in new funding round.  

The new funds will support further development, external technology validation and production capabilities for ONT’s molecular sensing technology that includes NGS, using both protein and solid-state nanopores, as well as other applications including protein analysis.  

The new round, raised via a private placement of ordinary shares, was funded by existing and “several exceptional new [institutional and individual] investors” from both sides of the Atlantic, including Lansdowne Partners, IP Group, Invesco Perpetual, Redmile Group, and Illumina (previously announced as ONT’s sales and marketing partner for exonuclease NGS technology). In total, ONT has raised £49 million ($80 million) since the company’s formation in 2005. 

“We are very pleased with this fundraising,” Oxford Nanopore CEO Gordon Sanghera told Bio-IT World. “Not only was the round oversubscribed, but we have an increasingly strong shareholder base of institutional investors and they are very supportive of our growth plans. They were particularly attracted to the platform technology aspect. By having a single core technology – our GridION platform – and a range of high-potential applications that leverage that platform, we can achieve compelling efficiencies in R&D.”  

Sanghera added that the GridION platform is showing great promise in developing techniques for electronic protein analysis. As for its flagship NGS applications, ONT has not publicly disclosed its progress since a landmark publication in Nature Nanotechnology in 2009, which demonstrated the feasibility of identifying single DNA nucleotides on the basis of electric current measurements across a protein nanopore. However, the company recently released details of its platform GridION technology, which consists of a scalable modular instrument and a front-loading consumable cartridge.  

ONT has accrued a patent estate of more than 250 patents and patent applications in nanopore sensing technology through internal discoveries and a broad network of academic collaborations. The company recently forged an agreement with Harvard University that added graphene to an existing project in solid-state nanopore technology.