Oxford Nanopore Technologies

Gordon Sanghera and Spike Willcocks are the co-founders of Oxford Nanopore Technologies, a UK biotechnology company specialising in nanopore-based single-molecule sensing and sequencing. The company was founded in 2005 as a spin-out from the University of Oxford, with seed funding and guided by care to bridge academic innovation with commercialisation. Sanghera holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and a PhD in bio-electronics, and earlier worked in R&D and manufacturing roles within a medical-device company.

He led Oxford Nanopore from its early lab phase into commercial scale-up. Willcocks earned a DPhil in biochemistry at Oxford and brought strong strategy and scientific commercialisation experience into the business. Together they steered the company’s development of nanopore sensing technologies, which detect changes in electrical current as DNA or RNA molecules pass through tiny pores, enabling portable sequencing. Under their leadership, Oxford Nanopore launched its first commercial product line in 2015 and went on to list on the London Stock Exchange in 2021.

The company operates globally, serving research, clinical and industrial markets with devices such as the MinION, GridION and PromethION. Sanghera remains chief executive officer and Willcocks serves as chief strategy officer, with the mission to make sequencing more accessible, faster and widely distributed. Their entrepreneurial journey demonstrates how deep-science, university spin-out ventures can become significant global companies. Their focus on integrating life sciences, electronics and software has positioned Oxford Nanopore at the frontier of molecular analysis and biotechnology.