
Industry
The UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute collaborates with a number of industry partners to broaden our impact by applying genomics research to some of the planet’s most pressing challenges.

Colossal Biosciences
Colossal, a company that seeks to bring the mammoth and dodo bird back from extinction, is expanding its support for ancient DNA academic collaborations by pledging a gift of $500K to the UCSC Genomics Institute.
Oxford Nanopore Technologies
UC Santa Cruz Professors Dave Deamer and Mark Akeson invented the revolutionary nanopore sequencing technology that is currently being licensed to UK company Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT). This innovation has made it possible to use “long reads” to sequence previously inaccessible regions of DNA and RNA. This technology ultimately enabled the first complete sequencing of a human genome, co-led by our institute. The portability of the Oxford Nanopore MinIon device also allows sequencing to be conducted almost anywhere, from the international space station to emergency medical pop-ups to combat Ebola..


Google Health
In a project with Google Health, we built a method that can analyze data for Oxford Nanopore sequencers that was used in a study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, to identify suspected disease-causing variants in five critical newborn intensive care unit (NICU) cases. This technology was also used to break the Guinness World Record for fastest genome sequencing.
Google Research
Google Research has been a valued partner in our efforts to combat genomic bias by creating a new genomic reference, called a pangenome, that incorporates the genomes of hundreds of individuals from around the world, instead of just one.


Amazon Web Services
The UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute has collaborated with Amazon Web Services to allow researchers to quickly and efficiently execute bioinformatics pipelines on AWS’s global cloud infrastructure. We are committed to accelerating genomics research by integrating Dockstore, a leading repository for scientific and biomedical workflows created in part by our Genomics Institute researchers, with the recently released Amazon Genomics Command Line Interface (CLI).
Recent News
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Innovation Catalyst Grants propel research into real-world solutions
Awardees include innovations in preclinical testing, drug discovery, and biosensors by Genomics Institute core member Mircea Teodorescu and affiliates Andy Yeh and Nader Pourmand.
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Colossal pledges $600K to the UCSC Genomics Institute to support paleogenomics
Colossal, a company that seeks to bring the mammoth and dodo bird back from extinction, is expanding its support for ancient DNA academic collaborations by pledging a gift of $500K to the UCSC Genomics Institute.
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From concept to commercialization: How UCSC researchers revolutionized DNA sequencing
Nanopore sequencing technology, which has dramatically lowered the cost and increased the accuracy of genomic sequencing over the last two decades, was first patented and developed at UC Santa Cruz. Its inventors reflect on its history, as well as its seemingly unlimited potential for advancing personalized medicine and our understanding of our world.