ONT Patents - Part 1

In my previous post we looked at some of PacBio’s IP and how it might affect ONT (Oxford Nanopore Technologies)s ability to start using the hairpin duplex approach this year. If you’ve not seen the updates to that post I recommend checking it out. Essentially, it seems like ONT could start using the hairpin approach from this year.

ONT cited a number of issues beyond IP with the hairpin approach. Hopefully they were just deflecting from the fact that this IP was not available to them. If not then it suggests that ONTs platform will have persistent issues with any templates with hairpin like structures, and that an attractive route to high yield duplex sequencing is closed to them.

Anyway, today I decided to go through some of their other patents, sorting them by expiration date. This gives some sense of when IP might be expiring allowing other players to capitalize on the approaches they’ve developed: