David Deamer holds the MinION, a portable device for nanopore sequencing

Technology Licensing

Examples of our past licensing activities:

Oxford Nanopore logo

The UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute has contributed intellectual property (IP core) to the UK company, Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT). In 2023, UCSC’s Dave Deamer and Mark Akeson were awarded the prestigious Golden Goose Award at the Library of Congress for developing the nanopore sequencing technology behind ONT, which has revolutionized genomic sequencing by allowing for “long reads” that have been essential sequencing 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.

UCSC Genome Browser Logo

Shortly after the completion of the original Human Genome Project, we launched the UCSC Genome Browser to allow researchers worldwide to view and analyze the human genome. Over the years, it has added tracks for thousands of other species and is considered a Global Core Biodata Resource. It is free to all academic and nonprofit research institutions as well as individual users, but for-profit companies pay a reasonable seat license.

Nantworks logo

In 2010, David Haussler led the development of two key tools for use in precision medicine based treatments of cancer – the BAMBAM and PARADIGM cancer genomics analysis systems. BAMBAM is used to identify genetic changes in cancer cells while PARADIGM is used to understand which molecular pathways are affected by those changes. These were licensed to Five3 Genomics, founded by former graduate students from David’s and Josh Stuart’s labs. Five3 was acquired by NantWorks, which continued to commercialize these technologies. These tools had an early impact on the field of cancer genomics.

Last modified: Jul 02, 2024