Harvard University and Oxford Nanopore Technologies Announce Licence Agreement to Advance Nanopore DNA Sequencing and other Applications

Business Wire, August 5, 2008

The Group is also developing other applications that may utilize the sensitivity and speed of nanopore probing, and is investigating the physics of DNA polymer movement through the confined space of a nanopore, coordinating the application of material science tools to fabricate solid-state nanopores, and developing the associated biochemistry, molecular biology, electronics, and signal processing to effect molecular recognition. http://www.mcb.harvard.edu/branton/

Professor Daniel Branton, Higgins Professor of Biology Emeritus, Harvard University

Professor Branton's research areas include Nanopore technology and single molecule probing, molecular organization of cell membranes and cell biology. He has held positions at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA and the University of California, Berkeley. http://www.mcb.harvard.edu/Faculty/Branton.html

Professor Jene Golovchenko( )Rumsford Professor of Physics and Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics - Harvard University.

Professor Jene Golovchenko has had a broad research career, encompassing research posts at Harvard University, Aarhus University in Denmark, in industry, at Bell Labs, in national laboratories at Brookhaven and Livermore and at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. He is also a member of the Rowland Institute for Science, an interdisciplinary non-profit basic research institute in Cambridge.

Professor Golovchenko specializes in studying the fundamental interactions of radiation and matter and the application of this knowledge to revealing and controlling the properties of materials.

Oxford Nanopore Technologies Ltd.

Oxford Nanopore is developing nanopore technology, a revolutionary method of molecular detection and analysis with potential for DNA sequencing, diagnostics, drug development and defence applications. The company was founded on the science of Professor Hagan Bayley of the University of Oxford, who pioneered the stochastic sensing of single molecules using engineered protein nanopores, and has published a method to differentiate between DNA bases using a nanopore.

The Company's BASE[TM] technology is a system for DNA sequencing that employs nanopores to process, identify and record DNA bases in sequence. In contrast to current sequencing technologies, nanopores offer a potential method of directly sequencing DNA at single molecule resolution. This removes the need for amplification or labelling, and allows detection from an electrical signal rather than by fluorescence-based CCD imaging. In order to make a breakthrough in speed and cost, other competing technologies require step changes in optics, computation and CCD camera technologies. Nanopores provide an alternative path to a step-change in the power and cost of DNA sequencing.

Recent interest in the "race for the $1000 genome" illustrates the needs for a sequencing technology that is affordable and powerful enough to provide more researchers with affordable sequencing power. This is expected to enable an exponential increase in research and understanding of the genome, and accelerate new developments in medicine, agriculture, energy, biodiversity, evolutionary biology, genealogy and many other fields.