Temasek-backed biotech Oxford Nanopore wants to make genetics tech accessible to startups

WHEN the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, countries scrambled for a way to quickly detect the disease.

This brought public attention to the field of genomics – a branch of molecular biology concerned with the structure and function of the genome, which is the genetic information of an organism, and can be used to identify the presence of the virus.

Among companies in this field is London-listed Oxford Nanopore Technologies, which was spotlighted for providing Covid-19 test kits to the UK’s National Health Service. An offshoot of Oxford University, its sequencing technology was used by researchers to characterise the genome of the Sars-CoV-2 virus to identify and track variants.