Oxford Nanopore Technologies (LON:ONT) outlined progress in expanding its nanopore-based sequencing platform and highlighted continued revenue growth during a presentation at the 2026 JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco.
Chief Executive Officer Gordon Sanghera, who said he will step down at the end of the first quarter, described a 20-year effort to build “a single molecule electronic sensing platform” designed to “enable the analysis of anything by anyone, anywhere.” He said the company has moved from DNA and RNA sequencing into early-stage proteomics work, with potential extensions into metabolites and volatile organic compounds.
2025 revenue update and mix
He also pointed to the firm’s growth trajectory, stating that Oxford Nanopore has delivered 28% CAGR over the last five years and that growth in 2025 was supported by performance “in all our regions,” each growing over 20% and outperforming the broader market, according to management.
By end market, Sanghera said life science research tools remain the core of the business, representing 67% of revenue and growing 15% in 2025. He said applied markets now represent about one-third of revenue after increasing traction over the last two to three years, with clinical up 60%, biopharma up 30%, and applied industrial up 27%.
Platform positioning and workflow focus
Sanghera emphasized platform differentiation built on reading native DNA without fluorescence tags or amplification, as well as direct RNA sequencing. He said the company’s approach supports sequencing across a wide range of read lengths and enables detection of modifications. He cited the longest read reported to date as 4.5 million bases and described an ambition for customers to read “end-to-end chromosomes in one contiguous” read.
Management tied its commercial strategy to selecting applications suited to these capabilities. Sanghera described a broad market opportunity of $20–25 billion that could benefit from the platform, with $13–14 billion of “white space opportunities” in clinical and biopharma research that he said are unique to nanopore sequencing. He said partnerships help prioritize workflows across sample preparation, targeted enrichment, and downstream analysis.
Examples cited in clinical and biopharma
In clinical applications, Sanghera said infectious disease programs are the most advanced. He described work at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital in the U.K. involving respiratory metagenomic sequencing in intensive care settings, which he said has evolved into a U.K. government-funded rollout to 30 hospitals, with seven live at the time of the presentation. He said turnaround time can be two to three hours versus two to three days and noted that “one in three people are on a broad-spectrum antibiotic that is not going to do anything for them,” based on what the program has observed.
He also described a U.S. example involving the Advent Group, saying it established an in-house pathogen identification workflow and, in its first pilot, is saving $250,000 per year. Sanghera said Advent plans to roll the workflow out across 20 hospital groups. He further highlighted an “always-on pandemic radar” concept in which sequencing data is uploaded to the U.K. Health Security Agency, providing early warning capability for novel respiratory variants.
Another clinical workflow highlighted was adaptive sampling, which Sanghera described as on-instrument, real-time targeted enrichment. He said this approach could simplify panel workflows, citing a hereditary cancer panel example involving 258 genes that can be selected without a separate enrichment step. He also referenced a partnership with Asuragen involving 11 genes with challenging long-read-related issues such as copy number and gene fusions, positioning nanopore sequencing as a way to consolidate multiple assays into a single workflow for carrier screening.
In biopharma, Sanghera said partners have not publicly disclosed work with Oxford Nanopore, but he offered examples of use cases. In mRNA analytics, he said nanopore-based workflows can reduce characterization that typically requires “six to eight orthogonal analytical measurements” and takes about a month to an overnight run. He also discussed adventitious agent viral testing for viral contamination, saying traditional approaches take “two to three weeks,” while nanopore sequencing can provide real-time results. He cited ViruSure launching a fee-for-service CRO AVA workflow and said Eurofins used sterility testing that provided early warning and “saved a $15 million recall” for a biopharma customer.
2026 priorities and longer-term targets
Looking ahead, Sanghera highlighted increased throughput on PromethION. He said typical output has been about one human genome per flow cell, with early access work demonstrating two genomes per flow cell, and noted platform “headroom” to reach four genomes per flow cell. He said this could enable “a couple of hundred dollar fully loaded genome.”
He also discussed ongoing platform development, including exploration of modifications beyond methylation, progress in direct RNA and future tRNA work, and early steps toward proteomics. Sanghera said the company can now measure 20–30 peptides in a row and described progress on “amino acid callers” as part of efforts toward protein sequencing.
During the Q&A, CFO Nick Kehoe said the company’s initial 2025 guidance range of 20%–23% constant-currency growth reflected a cautious stance amid disruption to U.S. research funding, but Oxford Nanopore ultimately delivered 24%. Kehoe said the company believes it gained share in the Americas in research and government markets, supported by an increase in order volume that tended to be “smaller orders.” He said U.S. federal funding exposure was about 13% of revenue and noted China was less than 8%.
Kehoe also discussed a shift to a more traditional CAPEX model for larger instruments, saying it improved cash flow by about GBP 20 million per year and that the company saw more than 500 basis points improvement in gross margin in the first half, with 3–400 basis points attributed to pricing benefits tied to the change. He characterized the benefit as structural and said the business was exiting the year at “more like 100% CapEx.”
On medium-term targets, Kehoe reiterated that the company expects to reach EBITDA break-even in 2027 and said gross margin progress was tracking ahead of earlier expectations, noting an underlying level of 61% for the most recent half year after adjusting for a write-off, compared with a target of over 62% in 2027. He also said the company completed two restructurings during the year to refocus resources toward higher-growth opportunities.
Sanghera said incoming CEO Francis Van Parys will join in March, citing Van Parys’ experience at Cytiva and leading Radiometer. Sanghera also addressed manufacturing, saying a factory opened in 2018 with projections of greater than 30% growth and that there is “plenty of headroom” in consumables manufacturing, with additional scalability expected from improved chip capacity and throughput. He added that the facility is close to an FDA-auditable standard today and that the company expects further focus on regulated manufacturing as clinical growth increases.
About Oxford Nanopore Technologies (LON:ONT)
Oxford Nanopore Technologies’ goal is to bring the widest benefits to society through enabling the analysis of anything, by anyone, anywhere. The Group has developed a new generation of nanopore-based sensing technology that is currently used for real-time, high-performance, accessible, and scalable analysis of DNA and RNA. The technology is used in more than 125 countries, to understand the biology of humans, plants, animals, bacteria, viruses and environments as well as to understand diseases such as cancer.
