Harvard University and Oxford Nanopore Technologies in licence agreement

Harvard University's Office of Technology Development and Oxford Nanopore Technologies, of the US, have entered into an agreement to integrate Harvard discoveries with technology in development at Oxford Nanopore. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Under the terms of the agreement Oxford Nanopore has exclusive rights to develop and commercialise a number of nanopore technological breakthroughs developed in the laboratories of three investigators at Harvard and their collaborators at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the US Department of Commerce.

The academics have pioneered the research of DNA translocation through nanopores and the potential for DNA sequencing using this method. This is complementary to the work of Professor Hagan Bayley, the founder of Oxford Nanopore Technologies, who pioneered the field of nanopores as sensors of single molecules, with a specific focus on the identification of DNA bases.

Oxford Nanopore will also support fundamental nanopore research at Harvard, facilitating further advancement of the field and generating opportunities for further evolutions of nanopore sequencing technology.

Oxford Nanopore is developing nanopores for use in DNA sequencing and the analysis of other molecules. A nanopore is a small hole; this inner diameter is small enough to be used in the direct identification of many single molecules, without using chemical labels. This technology has the potential to deliver a dramatic reduction in the cost and speed of DNA sequencing, benefiting basic medical research and further the field of personalised medicine.

The single molecule analysis platform being developed at Oxford Nanopore is label-free, and is therefore positioned to deliver a step-change in the power and cost of DNA sequencing. While current technologies rely on expensive fluorescent labels, optical equipment for signal detection and informatics to translate image data into sequence data, nanopores bypass the optical detection by providing a direct electrical recording of DNA base identification. The method is highly scalable through silicon chip arrays.

"Harvard's long record of excellence in nanopore research means that this agreement encompasses many aspects of nanopore technology," said Dr Gordon Sanghera, ceo of Oxford Nanopore Technologies. "Through this partnership and agreements with other prestigious institutions, Oxford Nanopore takes the leading position in transforming nanopores from science into technologies that will benefit researchers and people everywhere."