Oxford Nanopore Technologies is looking forward to “the year of the proteome,” as co-founder and CEO Gordon Sanghera, PhD, labeled 2025 during his presentation at the recent 43rd Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. The designation was Sanghera’s way of emphasizing Oxford Nanopore’s commitment over the next five years to combine proteomics with multi-omics in its menu of sequencing offerings.
“That’s just because we’ve rinsed everything we can out of short-read, legacy systems,” Sanghera told attendees. “As people latch on—and they are!—to the native DNA and RNA, and then we provide the proteome in five years’ time, the two will catalyze and we will find more insights and interesting things in the genome, and the epigenome, and the transcriptome, because we’ve got the proteome and then we’ll have the metabolome all on the same platform.”
Sanghera added, however, “I don’t think proteomics will win over genomics. They go hand-in-glove. We’ve been overly focused [on genomics], and now we’re going to see an emergence of proteomics. And when the two are connected together, it will be a thing of beauty.”
In pursuing the proteome, Oxford Nanopore is building on strong results for 2024. The company said it finished last year with approximately £183 million ($228.4 million) in revenue, up 8% from £169.7 million ($211.8 million) in 2023. Oxford Nanopore navigated a “slightly” lower than expected approximately £16 million (nearly $20 million) headwind from COVID-19 sequencing and the Emirati Genome Program. Excluding these “headwinds,” the company said, its underlying revenue growth is approximately 23% at constant currency.
Second-half revenue grew 34% from a year earlier, as Oxford Nanopore stepped up its expansion into customer endmarkets outside of research, toward applied industrial, biopharma, and clinical customers.
Despite its strong numbers, 2024 was in part a year of loss for Oxford Nanopore, as co-founder and CTO Clive Brown departed to pursue other projects. Brown’s duties have been split between two company executives
Sanghera discussed Brown’s legacy, Oxford Nanopore’s 2024 results, and some of its recent initiatives with GEN Edge and GEN sister publication Inside Precision Medicine‘s North American Editor Jonathan D. Grinstein, PhD, in an interview conducted in Union Square Park, across from The Westin St. Francis Hotel where the J.P. Morgan conference was taking place. (This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)
GEN Edge: Oxford Nanopore recently announced the appointments of Rosemary Sinclair Dokos as chief product and marketing officer and Lakmal Jayasinghe, PhD, as CSO, both taking on duties previously held by Clive Brown, who stepped down as chief officer of technology, innovation, and products. How do you assess Clive’s legacy?
Gordon Sanghera, PhD: This is Clive’s vision. When he rocked up, we were about two years in. We had all these CADs of products. He just ripped them all up and said, “No, that’s not how this is going to work!”
But he always said he’s an early innovator, and in the early days he said that “once it starts working, I’ll be out.” But there was so much serious innovation in those 16 years, and he kept leading that function. He’s not that interested in the later-stage development, the regulation. And so there is a natural opportunity for him—as with many innovators—to go back to an earlier stage in development.
GEN Edge: Why did Oxford Nanopore break up Clive’s role into two positions as opposed to one? Where does each person pick up where Clive left off?
Sanghera: We could have actually made four positions. He’s a real polymath. So whilst he comes from a computational bioinformatics background, he had a deep understanding of biology and engineering and big data—all of that followed. And the succession plan was always to break up his position, but it’s also an evolution in the company as well. When he first joined, we were 90% innovation and a bit of tech transfer. And over the years, that’s almost become 50-50, particularly as we’ve started to think about going to the regulated markets.
Lakmal is the natural successor to lead our innovation efforts. And he came from [the lab of University of Oxford Professor] Hagan Bayley [PhD, a co-founder of Oxford Nanopore]. He did his PhD and was a postdoc at Oxford. Rosemary has been focused on late-stage development for the 10 years she’s been with us. Breaking Clive’s role into two distinct positions seemed a natural way for the company to evolve.
GEN Edge: During the J.P. Morgan conference, Oxford Nanopore discussed its preliminary second half and full year 2024 results. Second half performance was stronger than the first half. What accounted for the positive results and acceleration in H2?
Sanghera: We were pleased with our performance in 2024, with underlying growth of ~23%, which was in-line with our guidance and consensus in a year that proved challenging for the broader sector, demonstrating the value of our differentiated platform.
We are particularly encouraged by the increasing momentum in the second half of 2024, with overall underlying year-on-year revenue growth accelerating to approximately 34% in H2. Underlying revenue growth accelerated in all regions in H2, led by EMEAI and APAC and driven by new product launches in 2024, new and expanded contracts, and increasing sales team productivity.
Utilization of PromethION devices grew very strongly throughout 2024, with growth across the entire PromethION product range up approximately 55% year-on-year.
We also saw continued positive traction in new markets such as applied industrial, clinical, and biopharma. We delivered more than 40% year-on-year growth in applied industrial and performed very well in new applications such as synthetic biology.
We exited 2024 strongly with continued positive momentum in Q4. This momentum and our growing commercial pipeline across both our existing customer base and new opportunities underpins our confidence in continuing to deliver above-market growth in 2025 and the medium term.
GEN Edge: The company also cited strength in the PromethION 2 or P2 line. From what products did customers switch off to adapt P2? Would those be earlier Oxford Nanopore models or competitors’ products?
Sanghera: When you look at our portfolio, you’ve got MinION, which is 512 channels. You also have PromethION with 2,675 channels, but it’s up to 24 or 48 flow cells [PromethION 24 (P24) and PromethION 48 (P48)]. There’s a big gap for people who want to do a few gigabases or thousands of gigabases.
The 1,900 two-channel PromethION 2s was designed to fill that gap in our product line, and we’re seeing a nice uptick in utilization. For the first time, users can do higher output analysis but with a compact infrastructure.
GEN Edge: In November, Oxford Nanopore announced exciting progress with a collaboration with the UK Biobank and the NHS and Genomics England. To what extent has the NHS lagged behind in the adoption of genomics compared with Western Europe and the United States?
Sanghera: That partnership is NHS England, UK Biobank, and Genomics England. Did you know that Genomics England is sequencing 7,500 patient samples that they did in their 100,000 rare disease cohort, where they were unable to resolve with short resequencing?
With UK Biobank, we’re going to create the first comprehensive epigenetic atlas of methylation data. That’s 50,000 UK Biobank patient samples. As part of a nanopore sequencing run, you get 97–98% methylation. No other tech can do that. So, we’ll be able to create that epigenetic atlas, which I think will be a game changer. It’ll be as important as the genome, having C bases modified to a five-base genome.
And in the [U.K.’s] new government, the new health minister [Wes Streeting, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care] has come in and stated that they want to bring innovation into the NHS much faster… The NHS signed an agreement to take what we were doing on respiratory metagenomics in intensive care units in Guy’s and St. Thomas’ [NHS Trust], which we’ve done for the last three winters. We found funding, and they will roll that workflow in up to 30 NHS trusts, with a view to making it all NHS trusts.
The clinical benefit is you get results in four to six hours, rather than four to six days. Over 45% of the 450 patients were on a broad-spectrum antibiotic that was ineffective. So, that treatment was changed—half of them same day, half of them the next day. So that really gets people out of ICU. There’s also a real cost-benefit analysis. If and when there is another pandemic, or if there was a bioterror threat, intensive care clinics will be able to identify it earlier and increase the chances of saving the most frail and the sickest people.
We now have interest in that workflow in Asia-Pacific, the Americas, and Europe. So, we’re excited about rolling it out globally. It’s a landmark thing for the U.K. to be doing and other international partners are also starting to see the benefits our technology can provide.
GEN Edge: Any American inquiries on this?
Sanghera: Absolutely. I think they want to see how it goes in the U.K. Once we get three, four, five, or six [hospitals] running, they’ll see that it’s transferable. You will hear more about that workflow, and that’s the most advanced workflow we have for clinical applications.
GEN Edge: Was this U.K. collaboration a result of the new administration under Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer? Or was this in the works before he became prime minister?
Sanghera: It’s a three-year work in progress. The data is really compelling and the team at Guy’s and St. Thomas’—Prof. Jonathan Edgeworth, who’s the lead clinician, and Prof. Ian Abbs [chief executive of the Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust]—have been very vocal supporters and convinced other hospital trusts that this is something that they should look at. [Edgeworth is the Trust’s leader of the clinical microbiology and infection consult service for critical care; Abbs is set to step down later this year]
Inside Precision Medicine: We’ve been speaking about the PromethIONs and some of those solutions. Can you discuss field-bike solutions such as the SmidgION portable DNA sequencing platform under development?
Sanghera: The closest thing we have to a SmidgION in the market right now is our hundred-channel Flongle. And when we look at our customers there, they tend to want rapid turnaround times, in food safety, and even some potential clinical customers. So, we can clearly see there is demand for a small, cost-effective, quick turnaround time.
If you take the Guy’s and St. Thomas’ respiratory metagenomics workflows and extrapolate that, you could see meningitis in a doctor’s office. In contrast, you just do a scan to see if it’s viral or bacterial, and if viral, you’re going to get a push notification for all the pharmacy providers for your cold and flu remedies. If it’s bacterial, then you’d be given antibiotic stewardship. That decentralization is something the government is interested in.
With distributed, easy-to-run systems, this could be as ubiquitous as a telescope or a microscope, and it will be.
One of the areas that we are really making inroads in is education. During our U.S. Nanopore Community Meeting in Boston last September, a 16-year-old student from New York State got up and gave a talk on his local lake. He was able to determine it was full of bad things and he brought it to the attention of the local authorities. I mean, he’s a kid who is super bright. We’ve always felt that is a really exciting component. DNA can be fun. We can all be citizen scientists, and in the future, we could all go into a garden and type various plants and species.
Inside Precision Medicine: With the NHS, you have this very centralized, foundational, almost long-term sort of data and building upon the accumulation of all the datasets, and that’s a lot of non-communicable disease and whatnot. Then this more in-the-field stuff is interesting. You’re coming at it from the other angle of rapid onsite [diagnosis], independent of even the person’s background. It would appear to not just democratize medicine but be creative.
Sanghera: You can take that a step further. Parents could have this device at home, and when their child is sick, you could have a tick that says “‘Data: I agree to let it be used for big data analysis.” And over time, they have this huge dataset.
So right now, the U.K. has got a quadruple infection going on: RSV, flu, COVID-19, and strep A. We’ve always kind of envisaged over a decade or even five years, if you’re looking at a lot of P-tests (mean healthcare testing probabilities), and you can type, you would be able to give not just an antibody absence or presence but actually know what strain it is. You can start to be predictive by leveraging the big data.
GEN Edge: Where will we start to see that within clinical care?
Sanghera: I think that it’ll happen first in liquid biopsy patients who have cancer who are in remission. They’ll test every month.
That’s why I always use the analogy of mainframes to desktops to handhelds. Over the last 30 years, we’ve gone through the information age to where we are now. There’s going to be a DNA-RNA information age. It’s just around the corner. And that real-time streaming is going to be huge, absolutely huge. Nobody really thought about what you would do with real-time data on a phone or on a desktop. But now, we can’t live without it.
GEN Edge: How do you think that transition will occur?
Sanghera: One thing Clive was always excited about was a wellness monitor that looks at your RNA. So, if you have a cold, your RNA expression will change before any symptoms appear. Eventually, you’re saying, “I’m looking at my RNA expression, and it’s not good.”
So there’s some really amazing things that are going to emerge. In the first instance, they’re cutting edge clinical—early cancer diagnosis, early infectious disease diagnosis in clinical care. But ultimately, it will make speed of care ubiquitous.
GEN Edge: Let’s talk about the future. How does Oxford Nanopore see its role at a time when you’re seeing several newer challengers taken in sequencing? We’ve seen Illumina change its CEO and refocus somewhat and shift more toward clinical applications, in addition to research. Will Oxford Nanopore look to offer a more direct challenge to either the established sequencing companies like Illumina or MGI Tech or newer companies?
Sanghera: Right now, the Venn diagrams are completely separate. Because there’s enough of an unmet need in what we do with the native DNA—whether it’s methylation, whether it’s point of care, time to result. Twenty-five percent of some of the hardest diseases (developmental disorders, CNS, neurodegeneration) are all wrapped in the dark genome. Nobody else can get at it at our scale in the way we can.
But over time, as we bring down costs—and we have a road map to halve the cost of a human genome—we will start to see overlap because it will just be natural. You can get everything with long reads that you get from short reads. And, you’ll be able to get it at the same sort of price point with all the additional data that you don’t have today.
That’s why we delivered 34% in the second half of 2024: Because we are targeting the applications that only we can do. We have a premium product.
Now we have a roadmap that gets us to a $200–$300 genome. Then you have a premium product that’s affordable for everybody. Right now, the premium product is a price to pay, but people are starting to see the benefits, particularly in the clinical space.
There are a lot of great clinical applications. Where you’re really going to see breakthroughs is single point mutations, and with long read structural variation, or methylation, or all three. With our NIH program on Alzheimer’s, researchers are seeing methylation and structural variation. As that data emerges, it’s almost like focusing the telescope, or in this case the microscope, and you’re starting to see a much clearer image of the multi-omic influence in the genome.
The high-definition view of the genome will be game-changing and disruptive. Our biomarker discovery will excite, early diagnosis will become clearer, and treatments will become easier to build off of that information.
