Amgen invests in Oxford Nanopore

When there is a lot going on in the general news, it's useful to refocus on company specific updates. After all, we invest in actual enterprises which do useful things in the real world, and get paid.

Readers will know that Vestact has a number of active investments in biotechnology, on the basis that as humans get older and richer, they also get complex medical conditions that need advanced treatment. One of the most promising areas of medical technology is genetic therapy, where diseases can be reversed by identifying and then replacing cells which contain the problematic "code". To do that, researchers need to first identify the human genomes responsible for particular conditions, and then check to see if a patient has those genes. To do that, they need genetic sequencing equipment.

Our top biotech holding is California-based Amgen. This week, they announced a £50 million ($66 million) investment in a UK company, Oxford Nanopore Technologies Ltd. Oxford Nanopore has developed a "proprietary sequencing technology that uses many nanopores (nano-scale holes made by proteins contained within a synthetic membrane) in combination with electronics to perform direct, real-time sequencing of DNA and RNA". Some of their devices are literally hand-held!



Of course, we recently added Illumina to our group of recommended stocks, which also makes gene sequencing machines (in fact, it is by far the market leader in that field). Byron wrote about their quarterly results release earlier in today's message.

Read the full Oxford Nanopore press release here: Amgen.com News.