A Roche Nanopore History
Executive Summary1: There’s a long rich history of nanopore sequencing, and Roche-style Xpandomer sequencing. You should expect a crowded IP landscape2.
History has a habit of changing.
Bits of it being rewritten, forgotten. Or it simply being in nobodies best interests to accuracy remember.
But I like to make an attempt to remember the past.
So let us go then you and I, back… back to the very beginning of Roche-style nanopore sequencing.
No not Stratos!
No no, not Genia!
Back all the way to 1998 and a man called Preben Lexow.
Preben Lexow And Lingvitae
In 1998 Preben filed a patent where he proposed “a new method of sequencing involving the magnification of one or more of said bases to aid identification”.
The earliest versions of this patent available show these structures where a template DNA sequence used to create a longer “expanded” DNA sequence which is easier to read using a nanopore:
Here ligation is used to assemble the expanded template from these hairpin structure. The approach is not dissimilar to that ligation based approach Stratos presented 10 years later:
After filing these patents Preben founded Lingvitae in 2002 to develop these ideas. Lingvitae doesn’t appear to have raised massive amounts of money, a 2006 report notes they had only deployed $5.6M.
In the early 2000s they began a collaboration with Amit Miller3 . This work was reported in a 2007 paper, but appears largely to have been a proof-of-concept using synthetic templates.
Shortly after this, Stratos Genomics was founded to pursue a similar approach.
Lingvitae continued for some time, but perhaps due to a lack of funding, started downplaying sequencing in 2012 and focusing on an optical drive based diagnostic platform:
Tragically Preben died in 2018.
If Roche releases a world changing nanopore sequencer next month. LingVitae may be the Manteia Predictive Medicine of nanopore sequencing…
Stratos Genomics
While LingVitae attracted limited investment Stratos Genomics did somewhat better.