Huge congratulations to Oxford Nanopore as it makes its’ debut on LSE today.
Published in
2 min readOct 1, 2021
Oxford Nanopore is a UK science & technology success story — in many ways it’s a case study in going from the lab to a listing and seeing (as we do) an IPO as a financing event, not the end of the journey.
- They are the emerging leader in DNA sequencing, unlocking the fundamental code of biology to drive innovation in life science, healthcare, secure food supply and beyond
- Building frontier tech takes time. In this case it took 16 years from lab to listing. Oxford Nanopore was spun out from Prof Graham Richard’s Chemistry lab at Oxford University in 2005 by Gordon Sangera and Prof Haygan Bayley
- It then took 12 years to get to product market fit. The Minion, the 1st portable commercial sequencing device was first available commercially only in 2015.
- We are still only at the foothills.
- Oxford Nanopore’s long read sequencing tech showed immense value during COVID, using its distributed low cost (mobile v mainframe) approach: both for testing as well as epidemiological surveillance
- Our neighbours at The Crick shared with us how they were using LamPORE and how they envisaged a LamPORE device in every GP practice, in every factory or school
- When we spoke to Guy Thwaites at the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Vietnam, he and his colleagues shared with us how valuable, compelling and transformational long read sequencing has become over the past 2 years based on the turnaround time, portability and long read capability
- They were exploring its potential in providing rapid diagnostics in patients with brain infections and generating whole bacterial genome sequences, describing the experience as “fascinating and exciting”
- And Parker Moss at GenomicsEngland shared how Nanopore will be major part of consideration going forward, specifically in cancer, where Nanopore’s near real-time readout is a huge differentiator
- We were delighted to have invested via Latitude 25 months ago — as one of our early prepared mind investments in emerging UK deep tech icons, and to have had the opportunity to work with Gordon, Zoe, John and the phenomenal team at Nanopore
- We think this is a company that over long term — as biology, software and data converge — can be at least as significant as ARM, and will soon play in the league of NGS leader, Illumina, which is trading at $60bn+ market cap
- It’s been an impactful year for our New Palo Alto healthcare portfolio, with 2 IPOs in the last 6 months following Vaccitech in May, and accuRx delivering 30% of all UK vaccination bookings
- Some of many reasons we are long New Palo Alto deep tech
