Technology

The innovation that forms the basis of our technology came about as a result of a serendipitous discovery in the lab. One of the fundamental issues with pore-based sequencing techniques has been the speed at which DNA strands transport through the pores. Traditional nanopore approaches yield a speed of 1 base/microsecond. This requires a high bandwidth readout with attendant noise – and therefore has been limited in read accuracy. Our fortuitous discovery provides an elegant, inexpensive and manufacturable solution to this challenge.

Our technology is best described as a “Tortuous Nanopore.” This proprietary structure solves the fundamental challenges outlined above by naturally controlling the speed of nucleic acid transport through our nanochannels, without the need for preparing a sample library or adding biological constructs. Further, because our optical readout mechanism has massively parallel capabilities, the resultant output will provide high accuracy and fidelity, combined with a very high throughput, reducing the overall sequencing time to minutes. This unique approach to long-read sequencing will provide life science researchers with a powerful tool that can detect previously unseen nuances, and provide more accurate identification of genome variations and abnormalities. This innovation will ultimately enable researchers to make new discoveries more rapidly and more consistently than is possible today.