Oxford Nanopore at JPM 2026: Passing the Baton on a 20-Year Journey

By Allison Proffitt

January 12, 2026 | Gordon Sanghera, CEO, presented on behalf of Oxford Nanopore Technologies at the 44th Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference this week in San Francisco. In what he described as his final appearance at JPM as CEO, Sanghera reflected on 20 years of building a company around single-molecule electronic sensing while outlining a growth trajectory that saw the company exceed expectations in 2025.

"This has been a 20-year journey for me," Sanghera said. "I was employee number one, often referred to as patient number one. Still here, still going." But change is coming: Sanghera will step down at the end of March 2026, handing leadership to Francis Van Parys, who brings experience from GE, Cytiva, and Radiometer—several billion-dollar companies with biopharma and clinical market expertise.

The timing of the transition reflects Oxford Nanopore's evolution from an academic tool to a company delivering applied market solutions. "We've laid the foundations of our innovation engine in the hands of our customers in our life science research tools business," Sanghera said. "We now really want to scale these businesses in the applied markets."

Strong Performance Despite Market Headwinds

Oxford Nanopore reported revenues of £223-224 million for 2025, representing 24% growth on a constant currency basis and exceeding consensus expectations by 3%. With approximately £300 million in cash, the company remains well-capitalized for continued growth.

CFO Nick Keher attributed the outperformance to focused execution across all regions. "We set out some prudent guidance at the beginning of the year, said 20% to 23%. We've delivered 24%," Keher said. "We think we've taken share in the Americas, particularly in the research space."

The company’s revenue mix continues to shift toward applied markets. Life Science Research Tools still represents 67% of revenues with 15% growth, but clinical markets grew 60%, biopharma 30%, and applied industrial 27%—collectively representing a third of total revenues.

Regional performance was strong across the board, with all regions delivering over 20% growth despite a large APAC contract rolling off in the second half of the year. "This is all markets, all product lines. We saw growth," Keher emphasized.

The Native Advantage Continues

Echoing themes from previous years, Sanghera reinforced Oxford Nanopore's fundamental differentiation: reading native DNA and RNA directly through nanopores with electronic sensing. "We read the native DNA directly, which means we can see modifications," he said. "We also read RNA directly."

The platform's ability to deliver comprehensive multi-omic data in a single run—including SNPs, structural variants, copy number variations, and methylation—positions it uniquely in a $20-25 billion addressable market. Within that, Sanghera identified $13-14 billion in white space opportunities unique to nanopore sequencing.

The richness of the platform's output continues to expand. Oxford Nanopore can now read DNA at any length—from hundreds of bases to the longest read on record at 4.5 million bases. "We have an ambition at Nanopore that one of our customers will read end-to-end chromosomes in one contiguous, fully loaded read," Sanghera said.

Applied Markets Drive Growth

The company's strategic focus on applied markets is paying off, with partnerships guiding workflow development in clinical, biopharma, and industrial applications.

In clinical infectious disease, Oxford Nanopore's most advanced program, a UK government-funded initiative is rolling out respiratory metagenomic workflows to 30 hospitals. The approach reduces turnaround time from days to hours and has revealed that one in three ICU patients are on broad-spectrum antibiotics that won't help them. In the US, Advent Health brought the workflow in-house and is saving $250,000 annually in their pilot, with plans to expand across 20 hospital groups.

"Sequencing is replacing traditional microbiology," Sanghera said, adding that the NHS rollout will create an "always-on pandemic radar" by uploading pathogen data to UK Health Security Agency for early respiratory pathogen detection.

The company's adaptive sampling technology—real-time, on-sequencer targeted enrichment—is opening new opportunities in clinical panels. "As the DNA goes through the hole at 400 bases-per-second, in the first second or two, the sequencer will decide whether it's a gene of interest," based on a pre-loaded panel of genes of interest, Sanghera explained. This eliminates pre-enrichment steps, reducing time, cost, and complexity while providing more comprehensive coverage.

In biopharma, Oxford Nanopore has partnerships across drug discovery, biomanufacturing QA/QC, and fee-for-service providers, though Sanghera noted that "every single one of our biopharma partners said we can't talk about what we're doing with them." He did highlight transformative workflows: characterizing modified RNA that traditionally takes a month with six to eight orthogonal measurements can now be done overnight in one run. Similarly, adventitious agent viral testing can be performed in real time versus the typical two to three weeks.

Pushing the Frontier

Beyond immediate market applications, Oxford Nanopore continues advancing its platform capabilities.

The company launched the P2i, a two-channel PromethION, which is driving strong PromethION adoption, Sanghera said. The company also launched the MK1D, replacing the MinION Classic.

“If you have one of these,” Sanghera said, referring to the original MinION, “keep it. It’ll be worth a lot of money one day.”

The company just launched two human genomes per flow cell in early access, with headroom to reach four genomes per flow cell—bringing fully loaded genome costs to "a couple hundred dollars."

Accuracy improvements continue, with Oxford Nanopore claiming to be "the most accurate sequencer on the planet" at Q30, with confidence that Q50 will be enabled through machine learning and AI advances. "That really will be transformative," Sanghera said.

The proteomics ambitions Sanghera outlined in 2025 are progressing. "We can now measure 20 to 30 peptides in a row," he said. "There's an application there, unique peptide measurement. And our amino acid callers are coming along, so we're making good progress on pure sequencing of proteins as well."

Direct RNA sequencing is expanding from biopharma applications into transfer RNA (tRNA) research. "Five years ago, RNA was an academic curiosity. Today it's driving biopharma. We're just scratching the surface on understanding RNA," Sanghera said. "Understanding mutations in DNA, understanding full length transcript directly in RNA and modifications, particularly epitranscriptomics, will really allow us to understand how we're coding."

Business Model Evolution

A significant change in 2025 was the shift from an OpEx lease model for large instruments to selling devices upfront—a CapEx model that aligns with competitor practices. "We had a business model with the MinION ... mass produce that, get it to as many hands as possible, get people sequencing, made perfect sense," Keher explained. "With the large devices where we've got the GPUs inside, placing the instrument with customers, [shifting the business model] was the right thing to do."

The transition improved gross margin by over 500 basis points, with 300-400 basis points coming from the pricing benefit in the first half alone. Cash flow improved by approximately £20 million annually. "That is not temporary; that is structural," Keher said. The company exited 2025 with essentially 100% CapEx sales and expects full-year benefits in 2026 plus continued volume growth.

Looking Ahead: 2027 Breakeven Target

Oxford Nanopore maintains its target of achieving breakeven in 2027, though Keher acknowledged that market conditions and execution challenges have made the path more complex. "When we set that guidance, we said that we're aiming for over 30% growth per year. Clearly things have gone awry since then," he said. "We've gone through two restructurings this year to refocus capital, reallocate it to higher growth opportunities."

The company is moving ahead of schedule on gross margin, reaching 61% in the first half (adjusting for write-offs) against a 2027 target of over 62%. Key growth drivers for 2026 include the UK Biobank contract to sequence 50,000 samples for the first comprehensive methylome, continued clinical and biopharma adoption, and platform improvements in throughput and adaptive sampling.

Risk factors include federal funding in the US (13% of revenue exposure), China restrictions (now less than 8% of revenue), and contract timing in various regions. "There is part of this where, yes, the market's been difficult and things take longer than expected," Keher admitted. "And I think we've also got to reflect—we've got things to work on internally as well in terms of execution."

A Reflective Departure

As Sanghera prepares to hand over leadership, he remained characteristically forward-looking. When asked about next steps, he quoted David Bowie: "I don't know what I'm going to be doing next, but I can assure you it will not be boring."

Reflecting on 20 years building Oxford Nanopore to a quarter-billion-pound company, Sanghera expressed optimism about the sector's recovery from post-COVID challenges. "It's been a tough five years in the public domain, but… this conference feels like the green shoots of recovery are coming back," he said. "The only thing I'll be disappointed about is the share price is going to go up just as I leave. But I'll take some credit for that."

His final message emphasized the distinctiveness of Oxford Nanopore's approach, both in light of current competitors and expected new high throughput sequencer offerings to come from Roche and Element Biosciences: "They're all a form of sequencing-by-synthesis. They take that beautiful high definition, all those [modifications], all that biology, and completely pummel it to a black and white picture. So you get your SNPs and your SNVs, and that's it ... We're clearly differentiated and we wish to remain like that."