Oxford Nanopore Technologies officially announced first-half financial results, largely matching preliminary figures released a month ago, but the real news was two deals reached since June 30 and disclosed yesterday.
The one with the biggest material impact is a new global intellectual property cross-licensing agreement with an unnamed diagnostics company. Oxford Nanopore will recognize approximately $20 million in licensing fees in the second half of this year, along with $15 million in committed product purchases over fiscal years 2027 and 2028, and an ongoing royalty on revenues from certain products incorporating the licensed IP in the low-to-mid single digits.
The company did not immediately respond to a request for additional information, understandable, given the time difference. If I were forced to guess the identity of this partner, it’d be Danaher’s Cepheid. The companies expanded a collaboration for rapid bacterial and fungal pathogen identification earlier this year and plan to launch an early access program soon. But that’s just a guess.
In addition, Oxford Nanopore cemented its place with MyOme’s Zenith rare disease platform. Researchers from MyOme and Natera led publication of a study on implementation of nanopore sequencing for confirming copy number variants in a clinical setting, published in the Journal of Translational Medicine in 2023. Zenith has been launched in collaboration with Natera.
Oxford Nanopore also announced the appointments of Davide Manissero as chief medical officer this month and Conor McKechnie as chief marketing and communications officer come October.
Manissero was previously CMO at Denmark’s Radiometer and CMO at Qiagen from 2019 to 2024. McKechnie was previously VP of Marketing at Danaher’s Cytiva and spent more than a decade in communications and marketing at GE Healthcare.
Ion Genomics News
If you haven’t yet listened to last week’s podcast with my friend and fellow reporter Will Herkewitz, check out our discussion about technology and its place in fighting ongoing epidemics of ebola and tuberculosis.
Technology, Trust, and Tuberculosis, with Journalist Will Herkewitz
How are people fighting ongoing epidemics using genomics-based technologies such as PCR testing and mRNA vaccines in a world where funding from the US and other rich countries is on the decline?
Other genomics news
Nucleai, Gilead Collaborate on Tissue Analysis in Cancer Therapy Development
Nucleai said it is running an ongoing translational research collaboration with Gilead Sciences to support Gilead’s global antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) clinical development programs.
FDA Grants Breakthrough Device Designation to Freenome's SimpleScreen Lung Test
The FDA has granted Breakthrough Device Designation to SimpleScreen Lung, Freenome’s blood-based lung cancer screening test, the company said Aug. 12.
Natera, Germany’s Kupando Partner to Track ctDNA Dynamics in Phase 1 Skin Cancer Trial
Natera’s Latitude tissue-free assay for molecular residual disease will be used to monitor treatment response in a Phase 1 clinical trial of Kupando Therapeutics’ lead immunotherapy candidate in patients with advanced skin cancers.
As reported by GenomeWeb’s Huanjia Zhang, researchers at the State University of New York at Albany have developed a way to directly sequence RNA using mass spectrometry. They published their study in Nucleic Acids Research in July.
UK-based Tagomics has launched LiquiPath, a cell-free DNA blood test for drug safety monitoring. LiquiPath combines Tagomics’ epigenetic technology, Activace, with methylation data to trace circulating cell-free DNA back to its tissue of origin. Tagomics has also launched an early-access program with AstraZeneca already among its pharma partners.
Elsewhere on SubStack
More from Nava Whiteford at ASeq: DNA Electronics, a UK-based startup that has raised millions to build a DNA sequencer, may be shutting down, according to a LinkedIn post from a former employee.
DNAe did not respond to Ion Genomics’ request for comment.
My Omics Reading List
Holley, G., Eggertsson, H.P., Kristmundsdottir, S. et al. “An Icelandic pangenome reference.” Nature. Aug. 19, 2026.
Here we introduce two new methods to address reference bias: Emblask for pangenome construction and Weaver for mapping to pangenomes at scale. Emblask is a hybrid long- and short-read haplotype-resolved dual assembly pipeline for parent–offspring trio data.
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Qiu et al. “A cross-organ single-cell analysis of hypertension.” Science. Aug. 13, 2026.
Working in mice and rats, the authors
developed an integrated single-cell atlas of hypertension and hypertensive end-organ damage across three widely used animal models representing major and complementary pathophysiological mechanisms of the disease.
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Kinney, et al. “UNCOVERseq enables sensitive and controlled gene editing off-target nomination across CRISPR-Cas modalities and systems.” Nature Communications. Aug. 11, 2026.
Unbiased Nomination of CRISPR Off-target Variants using Enhanced RhPCR is an “improved in cellulo off-target nomination workflow that sensitively identifies rare off-target events using defined inputs and analytical process controls.”
Elsewhere on the internet
President Donald Trump has nominated Heidi Overton, a White House aide and physician, as FDA Commissioner.
From the Reuters article on her nomination:
Chris Meekins, a former Trump health official who is now an analyst at Raymond James, [...] wrote in an analyst note on Wednesday that Overton has “seemingly no real experience running anything of consequence.
“Industry will view this pick as extremely troublesome and FDA career staff will continue to flee the agency in my view,” Meekins wrote. “Any progress made since Makary’s departure is likely to be quickly reversed if she is confirmed.”
For those of us who missed it, the previous commish, Marty Makary, “resigned in May after 13 months in the job, following clashes with White House officials over flavored vapes,” among other issues.