Latest Investment in NGS technologies

One of my LinkedIn connection has recently posted a nice summary of companies developing sequencing technologies that got fresh investment rounds. Considering this list covers only the latest 12 months I would say its significant. Here is the list (Thanks Jill L. Herschleb):

1. Element Biosciences - $80M (1/9/2020)
2. Omniome - $60M (1/9/2020)
3. Oxford Nanopore - $142M (1/3/2020)
4. Roswell - $32M (1/3/2019)
5. Genapsys - $90M (11/20/2020)

In this article I will talk about the technology that each one of these companies is working on, or at least as much as I can dig from patents and other online information.

Element Biosciences

Element Biosciences was founded in 2017 and has raised more than $100M US to date. Most of the company's high level people came from Illumina, which means they bring with them a wealth of experience. Looking at the current open positions I am assuming the company is developing an optical detection based platform, although there is no information to be found related to the chemistry used or means of detection. However, the CTO of the company (and co-founder), Michael Previte, used to work in single molecule detection technologies at Illumina, and Moly He, the CEO (also co-founder) worked at PacBio prior to Illumina, which might point to the type of chemistry they are developing. I would say they might be a competitor to PacBio in the near future...

Omniome

Omniome was founded back in 2013 and has raised close to $150M US already. Their technology is optical based but, unlike Illumina, BGI/MGI and PacBio, the nucleotides are un-labelled. It works on the principle of Localized Surface Plasmon Resonance, or LSPR, using a gold plated glass flow cell. Explained simply, the very thin gold plate on the surface of the chip is filled with patterned nano-holes, and the binding of nucleotides on the template DNA (and hence the name Sequencing By Binding, or SBB) causes a shift on the refractive index, which is measured by the optical system. It is still unclear if the nucleotides are protected to prevent the addition of more than 1 nucleotide at a time, or if multiple nucleotides can be added, and how does the system detect this. The company suffered a small drawback recently when the USPTO rejected the "Sequencing By Binding" trademark on the grounds that it was too descriptive.

Oxford Nanopore

Oxford Nanopore. Champion money raisers, with more than $600M US so far. Nanopore was founded in 2005 as a spin-off the University of Oxford. On their instruments this company uses lipid by-layers and engineered nanopores. The latest version of their nanopore is the R10, which happens to have a single molecule precision lower then its predecessor, the 9.4.1 (94% vs 95%), although the consensus accuracy has improved. The company already has a line of products in the market, from a USB style single flow cell device, the MinION, to a 48 flow cell cluster, called the PromethION. This company's biggest issues for some customers was the constant changes in their chemistry, nanopore versions and procedures, which makes impractical the inclusion of the products in production lines. However, the company already announced it will have a stable version of its products (based on the 9.4.1 nanopore) specifically to attend these customers, along with their traditional (i.e. constantly changing) product line.

Roswell

Founded in 2014, this company has raised $32M US in their latest series A round. Their molecular electronics chip seems to have attracted the attention of mr. George Church himself. It appears to be using tunneling current detection, where a pair of electrodes placed close together measure the current interference by the passage of the bases between the electrodes. Mounted between these same electrodes there is a DsDNA "bridge" which holds the enzyme through which the strand to be sequence will go through. This company previously estimated the instrument to be commercially available in 2019, which obviously did not happen. Maybe 2020 is the year where we will see it in the market. At least the renderings of both the instruments and the chip look really nice...

Genapsys

Since its founding, in 2010, Genapsys has raised around $200M US in several rounds of financing. Released last November, their desktop sequencer has a very small footprint and a surprisingly low cost, only $10K US. The technology used in electronic detection of DNA synthesis, similar to Ion Torrent. However, Genapsys seems to use magnetic beads and a set of electronic tweezers on the detection chip to keep the beads in place, instead of using micro-wells. This not only makes the chip easier to manufacture but probably helps with the liquid flow inside of the chip. Also, unlike Ion Torrent, the detection is not done using PH measurement (or at least not only using PH measurement) but measuring impedance, which changes as more nucleotides are added on the bead's surface. This might improve the accuracy of the detection, and might help with homopolymer detection problems, but I haven't heard any feedback about it yet.

This is obviously only a small summary of what these companies are doing and not an extensive study of it. If the reader knows more details and would like to share, please feel free to do so.

Also, as usual any comments and suggestions are also appreciated. Have a good weekend.