Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Harvard partners with U.K. firm on nanopore tech

By Mass High Tech Staff

Harvard University has partnered with Oxford Nanopore Technologies Ltd, officials report.

The school’s Office of Technology Development will share its R&D on nanopore technology with U.K.-based Oxford. Under terms of the deal, Oxford will have exclusive rights to develop and commercialize nanopore technologies developed in the laboratories of three investigators at Harvard and their collaborators at the University of California Santa Cruz and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The company will also finance research at Harvard. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Nanopore technology involves moving DNA through nanoscale openings (measured in one-billionths of a meter) to decode genomes.

The Harvard nanopore group is led by Daniel Branton and Jene Golovchenko. The group has been investigating electronic methods of rapidly detecting, characterizing and sequencing single molecules of DNA. The group’s research has led to the development of a new ion beam-based method for creating nanoscale structures in semiconductors called “ion beam sculpting,” according to the school.