Oxford Nanopore at JPM: A Proteomics-Genomics Thing of Beauty
By Allison Proffitt
January 15, 2025 | Gordon Sanghera, CEO, presented on behalf of Oxford Nanopore Technologies at the 43rd Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference this week in San Francisco. Sanghera led the major sequencing companies in position on the program, presenting on Monday a multi-omics and proteomics emphasis that was echoed throughout the week by other sequencing platform providers.
This is, after all, “the year of the proteome,” Sanghera said. “Everybody’s really excited… it’s all about proteins. That’s just because we’ve rinsed everything we can out of short-read, legacy systems. As people latch on—and they are!—to the native DNA and RNA, and then we provide the proteome in five years’ time—the two will catalyze and we will find more insights and interesting things in the genome, and the epigenome, and the transcriptome because we’ve got the proteome, and then we’ll have the metabolome all on the same platform,” he said. “I don’t think proteomics will win over genomics. They go hand-in-glove. We’ve been overly focused here [on the genome], and now we’re going to see an emergence of proteomics and when the two are connected together, it will be a thing of beauty.”
That broad, inclusive vision is echoed in Oxford Nanopore’s mission: to enable the analysis of anything, by anyone, anywhere. And in a refrain carried over from last year’s J.P. Morgan presentation, (“I think there’s a book running on how many times I’m going to say ‘native’!”), Sanghera said that Oxford Nanopore’s pore sequencing approach is inherently multi-omic.
“We read the native DNA, which means it provides us—off the bat—with a multi-omic sequencing run,” Sanghera said: “genomics; epigenetics, so modifications are retained; and direct RNA, so we can look at cDNA and RNA transcriptomics.”
Oxford Nanopore was founded in 2005, and in its 20th year, Sanghera presented on a company with an established platform, manufacturing capability, and a global team. He reported at 31% three-year CAGR for underlying revenue (excluding revenue from COVID testing and the Emirati Genome Program). Sanghera reported momentum, with the second half of 2024 growing at about 34% while the year as a whole grew at 23%. Nearly three-quarters of the company’s revenue comes from consumable sales, he said.
Sanghera describes four core end-markets for Oxford Nanopore: research (currently 70%), applied industrial (13%), clinical (9%), and biopharma (8%). He hopes to grow the latter markets. “We have taken the unique value proposition that nanopore sequencing provides—that native, multi-omic platform—and we have targeted end-market applications areas where we can only provide the solution to uncover the biology of interest,” he said.
New instrument launches have focused on research markets including the PromethION 2 Integrated (P2i), which was launched in late 2023 and grew in the second half of 2024. “We continue to push the envelope on accuracy and output, increasing throughput, enhancing accuracy, improving quality, driving down cost to the end consumers,” Sanghera said.
Offering end-to-end workflows is a key area of focus for 2025, he said. Delivering specific and efficient workflows—he listed Nanopore only T2T, NO-MISS for microbial sequencing, Single Cell workflow with 10X Genomics, and beta testing of a PGx panel with Twist Biosciences—will drive adoption and utilization of the Oxford Nanopore platform across the applied industrial, clinical, and biopharma end-markets.
New instruments are on deck, Sanghera said: the GridION Q-Line v1.1 for clinical and biopharma customers launched this year as well as the ElysION (announced in June 2024), which he said will come online in 2025.
Native Advantage
The fundamental strength of the Oxford Nanopore platform lies in pores that can sequence any native DNA or RNA fragment in its natural form, even telomere-to-telomere (T2T), and decode sequence in real time. Sanghera made a point to highlight Oxford Nanopore’s “several-year partnership with NVIDIA”.
Sequencing native DNA with no copying means large structural variation is captured, methylation is recorded, and the “dark genome” is accessible. “We are seeing enhancements in diagnostic yield, acceleration of biomarker discovery, and detecting all these variants bringing together a more holistic view of the genome,” Sanghera said.
But the company has other growth drivers including an “evergreen” IP portfolio. Though the company’s original patents are expiring, Sanghera said, Oxford Nanopore has more than 2,500 patents and patent applications in its portfolio. The company has also in the last three years, more than doubled its commercial infrastructure and operations, developing automation and enhancing manufacturing operations. “We are now reaping the benefits of that investment,” Sanghera said.
Finally, the company offers sequencers in a range of form factors, famously offering handheld, point-of-care, distributed sequencing; desktop sequencing; and high-throughput centralized sequencing.
These foundations allow sustainable innovation, Sanghera said, to extend beyond DNA and RNA sequencing to proteomics and metabolomics. For example, Oxford Nanopore has a proteomics assay in development, Sanghera said, and the company has a robust partner landscape to aid in innovation.
He highlighted just a few outstanding 2024 partnerships including research programs with PRECISE Singapore, UMC Utrecht, Genomics England and a newly announced program with UK Biobank to sequence 50,000 UK Biobank samples for the world’s first comprehensive methylome. Sanghera flagged 2024 translational studies with Al Jalila Children’s Hospital for newborn rare disease diagnosis, St. Jude Global Alliance, and tumor methylation profiling. Finally, he highlighted two projects moving into clinical practice including respiratory metagenomics at NHS UK and the AmPORE TB project with BioMerieux. Oxford Nanopore is prioritizing building its biopharma network, he added.
2025 Predictions
Looking ahead, Sanghera predicted PromethION output improvements. “We have headroom in the PromethION flow cells to get us toward a $200 to $300 fully annotated genome,” he said, “and that’s with full methylation, copy numbers, structural variation, etc.” The step changes in AI will also deliver accuracy and throughput gains, he said.
But most importantly in 2025, Sanghera said, “we will continue to build on our sample-to-answer, end-to-end workflows in the clinical, in the biopharma, and in the applied industrial arena to really drive adoption and continue our growth.”
The applied markets, Sanghera said, represents a $100 billion market potential that is untapped. “Our medium- to long-term outlook is to increasingly go over to those markets.”