People: Learning the hard way 

Gordon Saghera, chief executive of Oxford Nanopore, a private biotech concern 25 per cent owned by AIM-listed IP Group, is attempting to build ‘a billion-dollar tech company in the UK’.

He explains that at Oxford Nanopore he is determined not to make the same mistake as at one of his previous companies ‘where we didn’t execute as we should have done on IP’ (intellectual property). As a result, US companies turned ‘fantastic British technology’ into their own success story.

So this time Saghera has spent millions securing IP and forming exclusive agreements with the world’s leading scientists in the field of ‘nanopore’ technology. The company’s technology platform uses nanopores, which are very small holes that allow just single molecules through at a time, for electronic detection in a number of applications.

Its most advanced is a technique that will bring down the cost of sequencing DNA. This makes the company one of a handful racing to reduce the cost of sequencing a genome down to $1,000.

After a commercial agreement with San Diego-based sequencing leader Illumina signed for an upfront £11 million of equity last year, Saghera has topped up the coffers further with £17.4 million from UK investors and US institutions.