$1,000 genome sequence moves closer as Oxford Nanopore signs marketing deal

Image courtesy Oxford Nanopore Technologies

As part of the agreement the Oxford University spin-out will receive an equity investment of $18 million, which will be used to accelerate the development of BASE sequencing technology, and San Diego-based Illumina will make a further equity investment upon the achievement of an (unspecified) technical milestone.

Illumina Inc gets exclusive rights to market BASE sequencing products on a worldwide basis, with the two companies sharing the profits.

Jay Flatley, President and CEO of Illumina, said, “Oxford Nanopore’s technology holds tremendous promise to achieve the sub-$1,000 human genome.” This figure is significant as it is the price target set by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2002 as the figure at which an individual’s genome could be sequenced as part of routine medical care, thus opening the floodgates to personalised medicine.

While DNA sequencing costs have fallen a factor of 50 in a decade, it is still far more expensive than $1,000 to sequence the 3 billion base pairs of DNA in the human genome.

Oxford Nanopore’s sequencing technology allows for identification of DNA bases by making electrical measurements of each base pair as it passes through a protein nanopore. This removes the need for fluorescent labels, which reduces sample preparation time and cost, speeds up workflow and is far easier to manage, claims Oxford Nanopore.

“Making electrical measurements of unmodified DNA removes the need for complex sample prep and the high-performance optics found in today’s sequencing systems,” said Flatley.

“This alliance brings together today’s commercial leader in the field and what we believe will be the future’s best sequencing technology,” said Gordon Sanghera, Oxford Nanopore’s CEO. “The agreement reflects the rapid progress we have made in developing nanopore technology towards being the first label-free, single-molecule sequencing system. The partnership will enable us to further accelerate our development and enable broad commercialisation through Illumina’s significant commercial infrastructure.”  

Oxford Nanopore was founded in 2005 to commercialise the research of Professor Hagan Bayley. Since then, the company has focused on developing a mass-producible biochip and reader system. BASE (which stands for Bayley Sequencing) technology uses an adapted protein nanopore coupled with an enzyme to sequence DNA. The enzyme cleaves individual bases from a strand of DNA, and sequentially introduces the bases into the aperture of the nanopore. An ionic current is continually flowing through the pore, and as individual bases travel through it, each one creates a characteristic disruption in this current.

This signal is recorded electronically and interpreted to identify the DNA base. Recordings can be made from multiple channels in parallel, allowing high-throughput sequencing of DNA. By scaling into a massively parallel sequencing process on an array chip, the method has the potential to deliver dramatic improvements in cost, speed, simplicity and versatility of sequencing.