Novo Holdings, a leading international life science investor, has announced a 50 million GBP investment in Oxford Nanopore Technologies, a leading UK Listed company behind a ‘new generation’ of molecular sensing technology based on nanopores.
Novo Holdings will invest the funds in Oxford Nanopore as part of an equity issue and intends to add to this investment over time, with further purchases in the secondary market, subject to availability and price, among other factors.
Dr Daniel Mahony, Senior Partner, Growth Investments, Novo Holdings said: “Oxford Nanopore has made impressive ongoing progress to advance its technology platform and gain commercial traction. This investment underscores our belief in Oxford Nanopore’s platform and its expanding opportunity in biopharmaceuticals, where rapid sequencing, richer data and a streamlined platform can support discovery and delivery of new drug therapies. We are confident in Oxford Nanopore’s long-term value proposition after extensive due diligence within the biopharma community and analysis of their robust and extensive IP portfolio, and we look forward to supporting the Company going forward.”
Dr Gordon Sanghera, Chief Executive Officer, Oxford Nanopore added: “Novo Holdings is one of the world’s top life sciences investors, and we are delighted to welcome them as a long-term shareholder. The Novo Holdings team brings deep knowledge of the biopharmaceutical market, including biomanufacturing, a key growth area for Oxford Nanopore. Our technology platform is uniquely suited to address the needs of this industry, where information-rich, rapid and simplified sequencing are critical to developing and delivering biopharmaceuticals faster and with less complexity. We look forward to their support given our commitment to biopharma as one of our strategic growth vectors.”
Read more: Tecan and Oxford Nanopore partner for long fragment DNA sequencing
Oxford Nanopore has developed a ‘new generation’ of molecular analysis technology, which is today used for DNA/RNA sequencing. The company says the technology offers rich data including epigenetics, rapid insights through real-time workflows and portable formats, in a way that is accessible and affordable.
The technology is used in life science research, and increasingly in clinical and applied industrial settings including biopharma. It is deployed to understand biology across human health, plant and animals, pathogens and planetary health.
Rapid, direct RNA sequencing, provided by Oxford Nanopore, can enable biological manufacturing and quality control processes for an emerging class of mRNA-based products, potentially replacing multiple technologies with a single, streamlined platform and acting as an innovation engine for a multi-billion-dollar biopharmaceutical manufacturing sector says the company.
Oxford Nanopore also says that the generation of epigenetic data (variation in DNA information that can influence many diseases such as cancer) in large-scale studies can unlock discoveries with an impact across healthcare.