The company was founded in 2005 as a
spin-out from the
University of Oxford by
Hagan Bayley, Gordon Sanghera, and Spike Willcocks, with
seed funding from the
IP Group. The company made an
initial public offering on the
London Stock Exchange on 30 September 2021, under the ticker ONT. In March 2016 the company announced a chemistry upgrade to its nanopore sequencing product 'R9', using a protein nanopore in collaboration with the laboratory of Han Remaut (VIB/
Vrije Universiteit Brussel). The company stated in a webcast that R9 is designed to improve error rates and yield. with a MinION sequencer on the ISS in August 2016. In July 2016, a MinION nanopore sequencer was included on the ninth NASA/
SpaceX commercial cargo resupply services mission to the
International Space Station. The aim of the mission was to provide proof of concept for the MinION's functionality in a microgravity environment. During the mission, ISS crew members successfully sequenced DNA from bacteria, bacteriophage and rodents from samples prepared on Earth. Maintaining the MinION device as a research facility on the space station holds the potential to support a number of additional science investigations, any of which could have Earth based applications. ==Products==