Genetics Research, LLC (“GR”), a privately-held company developing a portfolio of novel and proprietary CRISPR-associated technologies for targeted DNA enrichment, announced today that it has licensed certain of its patents relating to this technology to Oxford Nanopore Technologies, Ltd. (“Oxford Nanopore”) based in Oxford, United Kingdom. This license enables Oxford Nanopore to use GR patents to enhance certain offerings on its proprietary nanopore DNA/RNA sequencing platform. Terms of the non-exclusive license agreement were not disclosed.

“We are delighted to have signed this agreement with Oxford Nanopore,” said Anthony P. Shuber, President and COO of GR. “This is one part of GR’s patent portfolio, which represents a completely new approach to targeting long DNA fragments for sequence-specific enrichment. Enriching sequence-specific long DNA is complementary to sequencing platforms with the capability to analyze long fragments, and we are excited that Oxford Nanopore will be integrating this method into certain workflows on its sequencing technology.”

“GR’s novel negative enrichment approach has exciting potential synergy with Oxford Nanopore’s platform,” commented Dr Gordon Sanghera, CEO of Oxford Nanopore. “Nanopore sequencing enables users to sequence native long fragments of nucleic acids, capturing multiple variants including complex structural variation and methylation in the same experiment. Delivering targeted approaches for these analyses allows users to focus on specific genomic regions that might be of interest, and to multiplex multiple samples in a single run. This offers users a roadmap to exploiting these novel markers in clinical research across large sample cohorts. Partnering with innovators like GR is important as we introduce new ways of performing rapid, near-sample targeted sequencing to the market.”

GR’s novel and proprietary CRISPR-based enrichment platform provide multiple opportunities to enhance the field of genomic analysis. In addition to its long DNA technologies, GR has developed next-generation targeted enrichment technologies that complement PCR and hybrid capture when applied to both long and short DNA fragments. These technologies have applications across both the life sciences and diagnostics spaces, including sequence-specific multiplex analyses in FFPE, and liquid biopsies.

Genetics Research develops innovative and proprietary technologies for the development of products supporting genomic analysis in research, diagnostics, and therapeutics. Oxford Nanopore was spun out of the University of Oxford and has since developed and brought to market a new generation of tools for biological analysis.