Oxford Nanopore Acquires Northern Nanopore Instruments
It looks like Oxford Nanopore have acquired Northern Nanopore Instruments. Northern Nanopore produced solid state nanopore research tools.
Northern Nanopore was essentially commercializing the controlled breakdown approach to solid state Nanopore fabrication developed by in the Vincent Tabard-Cossa lab.
The controlled breakdown approach applies a voltage across a silicon membrane (a commercial TEM window). This causes the membrane to break, forming a small hole. In the Vincent Tabard-Cossa approach they slowly ramp the voltage and monitor the current until breakdown occurs. They can also modulate the voltage post-breakdown to do what they call “conditioning” to increase the pore size.
You can create sub-10nm solid-state nanopores using this process in material as thin as 10nm.
That’s pretty cool and Vincent’s lab made all the labview, CAD files and PCB designs available in their publication1. However the software is covered with big scary warnings saying it’s not for commercial use.
Northern Nanopore was selling a commercial version of the controlled breakdown tools (no doubt they made a bunch of enhancements). I assume they licensed any IP from the lab around controlled breakdown.
Why?
The controlled breakdown is a neat research tool for making relatively small nanopores, but it’s not the only tool we have: