Oxford Nanopore Calls for Early Access Program Applicants

By Bio-IT World Staff 

 

November 25, 2013 | Oxford Nanopore this morning invited registration for the MinION Access Programme (MAP). Registration will remain open through the holiday period, the company said. In early 2014, at least two days notice will be given of closure of the registration period. Preference will not be given to early applicants.

 

On a registration site, Oxford listed the guidelines for application. Each individual applicant can apply for up to 50 MAP packages, consisting of a single MinION, a corresponding supply of flow cells/preparation kits, and software for running MinION and base calling. Applicants are not required to divulge their research intentions. 

 

The selection process was kept somewhat vague. The registration period close date has not been announced, and Oxford only said that MAP packages would be, “distributed to a broad range of applicants with some element of fairly-applied random allocation.” Applicants are invited from any country, though there may be shipping limitations. 

 

The company was clear, however, that competitors and their affiliates need not apply. 

 

Once registration closes, a number of applicants will be invited to join the program and relevant terms and conditions/licence agreements will be provided. At that point, participants will pay a $1,000 deposit (refundable upon returning certain parts of the package), and an additional shipping charge per MAP package. A test program will allow verification of the compatibility of the host computer system with the MinION software.

 

Though the complete terms and conditions won’t be made available until applicants are chosen, they can anticipate being allowed to develop applications under a permissive license (allowing end-to-end nanopore DNA sequencing-application development) and being free to publish their results and share their experiences after a compulsory burn-in period specified in the licensing terms, the company said. 

 

The company announced a new round of funding last month.