Biotech is feeling blessed in the UK as Oxford Nanopore Technologies has launched a £3.4 billion IPO.
Announced today (30 September), the Oxford-based firm’s IPO is targeting 425 pence per share, although at the time of writing it has reached a high of 622 pence per share, giving it a valuation of almost £5 billion.
Dr. Gordon Sanghera, CEO of Oxford Nanopore, says: “We are living on the cusp of the genomic era. I believe that our unique technology will open up many new possibilities for positive impact, both through enabling new discoveries in scientific research, and through more accessible, faster, richer biological insights in health, agriculture, food and understanding environments.”
Oxford Nanopore provides sensing technology that uses nanopores – nano-scale holes – embedded in high-tech electronics, to perform molecular analyses.
Its first products sequence DNA and RNA – and its sequencing technology provides real-time data delivery. The firm says its sensing platform has the potential to be adapted for the analysis of other types of molecules, for example proteins.
For instance, one product is PromethION, a device for production scale, on-demand access to terabases of DNA and RNA sequence data. The price tag? $195,455 (£145,000). Other products are in development, according to its website.
The biotech company explains that its platform is used by scientific researchers to answer questions about the biology of people, plants, animals, pathogens and environments. It is also “increasingly being used” in ‘applied’ settings such as clinical diagnostics, epidemiology and food safety.
While its IPO is a huge sum, it’s actually the eighth-biggest London listing this year.
Oxford Nanopore was spun out of the University of Oxford in 2005, and was valued at £2.4 billion when it raised funds in May.
Along with its HQ in Oxford, it has UK offices in Cambridge and Harwell (Oxfordshire); three in the US; and ones in Shanghai, Singapore and Tokyo.
The company is planning expansion as it has 73 open job vacancies on its website. Roles include software developer, web developer, infrastructure engineer, solutions architect and DevOps engineer.
In other biotech news, yesterday (29 September) London-based Lifebit, a precision medicine software company, got $60 million (£44.6 million) funding.
Lifebit offers access to biomedical data for governments, healthcare providers and research teams worldwide. It was founded in 2017 and offers a suite of AI-powered software solutions.
