Oxford Nanopore Technologies Ltd, an Oxford, UK-based technology company that has designed and sells a portable DNA/RNA sequencer, raised £100m (approx. $126m) in funding.
The round, which brought total funding to £351m, was led by new investor GT Healthcare, a pan-Asian fund with special reach in China, and existing investor Woodford Investment Management on behalf of its clients. Other new and existing investors including IP Group plc also participated.
The company intends to use the funds to expand its commercial operations across a range of territories, including in Asia, to invest in improvement of its existing products and to further develop and expand its innovative pipeline, including the mobile-phone compatible SmidgION sequencer.
Led by Gordon Sanghera, CEO, Oxford Nanopore has developed MinION, a portable, real time, nanopore DNA sequencer, that has been designed to bring biological analyses to anyone, whether in scientific research, education or a range of real world applications such as disease/pathogen surveillance, environmental monitoring, food chain surveillance, self-quantification or even microgravity biology.
Commercially available since 2015, the MinION is in use by a community in more than 50 countries, enabling myriad applications within the traditional laboratory environment and in the field.
In addition, the company provides PromethION, a standalone benchtop instrument designed for high-throughput, high sample-number analyses. while, to simplify sample preparation, it is advancing a 5-10 minute sample prep kit, and VolTRAX, a disposable sample preparation device designed to convert complex samples (eg samples may come from blood, saliva, the environment) into a form ready for nanopore analysis.
FinSMEs
12/12/2016