Oxford Nanopore raises $140M to set up sequencing showdown with Illumina | FierceBiotech
Summary
Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) has tapped a global syndicate of investors for $140 million to fuel its attempts to upend the genome sequencing market. How ONT fares as it expands over the next few years will dictate whether it can grow its valuation and realize its CEO’s vision of creating an independent British tech powerhouse. Those years will cover the period in which PromethION, a high-throughput benchtop sequencing device dubbed the “Illumina killer,” becomes available beyond the handful of labs in an early access scheme. Those labs have achieved progressively better yields in recent months—and are still a long way from hitting the 150Gb per flowcell ONT claims it clears internally—but it remains to be seen whether the device can establish itself as a genuine rival to Illumina’s sequencers. Oxford Nanopore could have avoided such criticism by ducking the fight against Illumina, opting instead to remain a niche business focused on enabling researchers in the field and students to sequence DNA using MinION, the Flongle adapter and smartphone-based SmidgION.
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