Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Welcome to today’s Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the pioneers of the business world together with the musicians shaping Jazz, Soul and Blues. My guest today is Gordon Sanghera, Co-Founder and CEO of Oxford Nanopore, creators of cutting-edge DNA sequency and analytics tools. Following his PhD in bioelectronic technology which he took on, he says, “to avoid the potential of an arranged marriage”, Gordon worked at Oxford University spin-out company, MediSense, developing electrochemical glucose monitoring systems. But fifteen years later, struck by what he calls an early midlife crisis and the end, apparently, of his amateur football career, Gordon sought a new adventure, together with scientists Spike Willcocks and Professor Hagan Bayley, they convinced Oxford University to launch Oxford Nanopore in 2005, its aim to develop a new generation of sensing technology that can read codes of DNA in real time. Covid-19 put Nanopore on the map, with a Government testing contract and deployment of its virus tracking devices in 85 countries but their technology is used to answer all kinds of biological questions, to detect cancer, to help authorities crack down on food safety and even for DNA sequencing in space.
My guest today, as I said earlier, is Gordon Sanghera, Co-Founder and CEO of Oxford Nanopore. Not a name we would have heard of but for, probably Gordon, what’s been going on in this extraordinary last two years and the phrase ‘genomic epidemiology’ again two words that most mere mortals would not have heard of, thought about or even understood for a second and yet here we are in 2022, here I am talking to you and the moment has come.
Gordon Sanghera
Thank you for having me. Yes indeed, Prime Ministers talking about PCR testing and mutations and genomes. As you know, we recently floated and we used to really worry and agonise about how we were going to explain what we do and why it’s important but just to rewind a little bit because we’re not just about Covid-19…
Elliot Moss
Of course.
Gordon Sanghera
…and genomic epidemiology. I want to just take you back to 2003. Bill Clinton talked about the first map of the human genome. It took 10 years, it cost almost 3 billion, so mapping the source code, the DNA of the human genome and all living systems, is something that we are very, very interested in. The pandemic has made everybody understand why and how a virus can spread and mutate and we have been at the forefront of sequencing the mutations from Delta to Omicron but prior to that we were also helping out with Ebola in Africa and Zika in Brazil. So this is something, you know, and we even look at pathogens and infections in plants as well, so much broader than Covid-19 but Covid-19 helps to explain and brings it to life for all of us, unfortunately, in this pandemic.
Elliot Moss
Well I think that’s right and I guess the genome point that you said is the underpin, the source code as you called it. Over the years as you talked about Zika in Brazil and you talked about Ebola in Africa, these of course have been things that we have been spectators to and I think the bringing it into our own lives has of course changed our perception of a) the importance of what you do and b) of course, the critical application of fixing things or at least understanding what it is that you might want to fix. Going way back, the science thing when you were a kid – because I’ve got kids and they’re now obviously much more interested in science than I think they would have been were it not for SARS-2 Covid – where did that interest come from in your own life?
Gordon Sanghera
It’s interesting. I mean, first of all, I’m old enough to remember the first moon landing, I was a young kid sitting there with my dad watching it on a black and white tv and my grandmother said, “It will rain tomorrow, they’ve landed on the moon”, that was her thing but, you know, so becoming really interested and then when I’d get toys, I’d take them apart, that seemed to be my thing, I wanted to know how they worked but I kind of fell into science more because I wanted to be a professional footballer. I had some trials for Swindon Town where I grew up, didn’t quite make it and, you know, a constant thing was well, time you got married then and you know, coming from a Punjabi family, it was all about arranged…
Elliot Moss
First generation.
Gordon Sanghera
Indeed.
Elliot Moss
It’s a serious business being first generation Punjabi, Gordon.
Gordon Sanghera
And the oldest.
Elliot Moss
Right. Older than… then that’s it. Your path is mapped.
Gordon Sanghera
Exactly.
Elliot Moss
Yeah.
Gordon Sanghera
So, I said well let me go and do a degree and I was quite good at chemistry so that was the default thing to do and then they said, ‘oh great, you know, you’ve got your 2:1 and off you go, time for an arranged marriage’. So, I really fell into a PhD in the interface between electronics and biology and that’s just like become the thing I do, it’s you know for all you youngsters out there, and my daughter’s just finished a Masters, really struggling to think about what your career is going to be and where you want to go, just follow your instinct and you know, and later on it all looks like it was all consciously made decisions but right now, you know, just follow your instinct and you know, when you’re young the roads open on a lot of opportunities coming at you.
Elliot Moss
The academic thing to me, interests me because often you meet academics and you are, you know, you’re from academia and they love what they do and they stay in that tramline. There aren’t many that make a successful transition to the world of business. You’re doing both. Is that every day a thing that’s just natural to you because of your family and because of your upbringing or is it something that you still sort of square off? Because the outputs are different, the outcomes that you want from business are different to necessarily what happens in the world of science.
Gordon Sanghera
Yeah, I think it is entirely the Punjabi thing, I mean there’s, you know, my dad came over at the beginning of the sixties to do engineering and the family joke is he ended up digging ditches, it was good money and he sent all that money back and his four aunts and my grandparents all managed to get over here but he never fulfilled his academic dream and by the time we were, you know, I was in my early twenties, mid-twenties, he had done quite well and you know bought several houses, as that was that generation and he said, ‘let’s start a business’, so there was always business conversations and I couldn’t think of anything worse than working with my dad so, I’ve always had an interest and in fact, and I did my degree and PhD at Cardiff University, bit of a backwater but great education, great professor who kind of… he hauled me in and said, for my final year project I thought um, I’m in trouble here, and he said, “It’s a really good project you’ve written there. Do you want to do a PhD?” and it, I was thinking if I get a pass, I’ll be happy, you know, and then I thought this is a good exit isn’t it, arranged marriages suddenly looking distant again so I said, “I’d love to” and that sent me on that path but going to Oxford was two things, one to convince myself, imposter syndrome alert right?
Elliot Moss
Well I was going to ask you about that, why you were telling me about this that you went from thinking had you passed to obviously being asked to become PhD, you looked like well, I was still shocked. So where’s that doubt from?
Gordon Sanghera
Do you know, I scraped through from my A-levels with a C and a D. Scraped into Cardiff but I was in a very big and happy, vibrant house but my four aunts were there, there was four of us, my two younger brothers and my sister, it was like noisy.
Elliot Moss
It sounds like a sitcom. It’s a great idea, the Sanghera sitcom, I can see it now.
Gordon Sanghera
You don’t get much time to sort of study because it’s like too much stuff going on but once I got to University, I got a 2:1. I did a PhD, I won an award from the Royal Society of Chemistry, these are all confidence points you pick and Oxford, it was a conscious decision to go there to a) tick off I could do it in the big leagues but b) to get into this company MediSense which back in the early eighties had been spun out when, you know, that whole thing was very alien and new and I was very fortunate to skip over. So, it was always a plan to go to Oxford to try and get a job in this company, where my PhD background could be put to real world use, that was always kind of the thing for me, more so than becoming an academic. I did interview for some academic positions and I slowly realised it wasn’t my calling, I wanted to make a difference in the world, not that academics don’t make a difference but an impactful difference, it seemed to be something very important to me.
Elliot Moss
I want to explore that a little bit later about why you think, why making a difference is so important to you. Stay with me for much more from guest, it’s Gordon Sanghera, he’s coming back in a couple of minutes. Right now though, we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Innovation Series, a new podcast which can be found on all of the major podcast platforms. Natasha Knight invites business founders to share their industry insights and practical advice for those of you thinking about getting into an industry and starting your very own thing. In this clip, focussing on the health and wellness industries, we hear from Ruby Raut, CEO and Co-Founder of WUKA, the UK’s first eco-friendly period underwear brand.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and indeed you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice or if you’ve got a smart speaker, why not ask it to play Jazz Shapers and there you will find a taster of our recent shows but back to today, Gordon Sanghera is in the hot seat, he’s Co-Founder and CEO of Oxford Nanopore, creators of cutting-edge DNA sequencing and analytics technology. Tell me a little bit about, you mentioned this making a difference and impact, tell my why, Gordon, that has become a thing for you versus doing, as you said, very important probably more esoteric, empirical research, there’s something in there that says you want to fix stuff. Where’s that from?
Gordon Sanghera
Um, I think partly the Punjabi thing again about ‘You must become a doctor’ and I couldn’t think of anything worse, I’m not really that tactile person who can help people but there are other ways you can do it and the move to Oxford was because the Prof had come up with this really amazing way of measuring blood glucose and his product was going to transform the lives of Type 1 diabetics, those who have to inject insulin, and in real time could measure glucose and there were two things, one, there was a lot of backlash from the medical community, ‘You can’t possibly allow people at home to test and measure their glucose. They won’t understand what to do with it, they won’t be able to get clinical grade results’. Yet, we did all that and we transformed the lives of diabetics and it was such an amazing journey, I remember we were in Atlanta, the American Association of Diabetes, and I had my MediSense badge on. This very attractive nurse came over and gave me a big hug and I went ‘thank you’ and she said, “My kids are so compliant with their glucose testing now because it’s such a simple, easy, so little blood comes out, device” and, you know, and that kind of you know that’s so you know gratifying to do something like that in your career, it was great.
Elliot Moss
And then let’s jump to the beginnings of Oxford Nanopore and that moment it happens and you find your two friends, your two scientists, and you drink, apparently, in the local pub and you say let’s go and do it and you do it. Tell me about those first few months and years when you’re trying to get the thing moving because obviously I was doing some research in your launch, your two and a half minutes on the Stock Exchange, there’s this little hashtag that comes up at the end of the film which says, I think it was anything, anyone, anywhere. You are now at scale. You are affecting the lives of millions of people, in all sorts of different ways and plants as well and farming and all those incredible, I mean just incredible output, from a small group of people saying we’re going to do something, just those first few things that you did to get you on the ladder to this, what were they?
Gordon Sanghera
Yeah, I think so, MediSense became a great success, was sold to a big US company, Abbott, for $876 million in ’96 and I worked for large pharma for seven years and it killed me, I am not very good with authority so, I was looking around I kept my eye in on Oxford Innovation and I met two people, there was one chap, Dave Norwood, who had set up a bank called IP2IPO and they had put 20 million into Oxford Chemistry and the person responsible for running the Oxford portfolio for them was Spike Willcocks, Co-Founder, and he and I had a chat in Chiang Mai Kitchen in Oxford, if you know it, and I normally went to the gym and I thought this is what you have to do with these banking types and we went through this whole list and then I said, “no, not interested, never, that was never going to work” and we, you know, and at the very end, he said, “I’ve got this single molecule stochastic sensing” and I just kind of quick look and I thought, actually, this is very similar to what I did with MediSense, all that learning I can bring over here and how to scale and manufacture and make products but on a much bigger scale from glucose to the source code of all living systems. Big leap but that’s, that was kind of the beginning of it and I met Dave Norwood and Spike in the King’s Arms in Oxford and over a pie and a pint, they gave me half a million pounds and I needed that to leave my job. My dad nearly killed me, final salary pension, new BMW every couple of years, executive in a big pharma and he just thought I’d lost the plot and, you know, it was that sort of early forties, mid-life thing as well. Have I got one big adventure left in me? And I really wanted to go for it and we got that half million and I immediately said to Dave, I’m afraid I’m going to hire Spike from you so, convinced him three months after we got going and that was the beginning of it. Three of us in the lab wondering how we were going to convert this really complicated academic thing into a plug and play, affordable, accessible DNA sequencer for anyone, anywhere.
Elliot Moss
So that growth thing, Gordon that you brought to the party, that ability to take something really interesting from a scientific point of view and then expand it out, really make it applicable, you brought in with you today two toys, which aren’t really toys are they, they are proper things. The little one there is called a…
Gordon Sanghera
MinION.
Elliot Moss
Not a Minion. A MinION. And the other one is called, which is a screen…
Gordon Sanghera
It’s a MinION Mark 1C.
Elliot Moss
The MinION Mark 1C which sounds like an aeroplane and that’s by design.
Gordon Sanghera
Yes.
Elliot Moss
These are very beautiful things. If you go online and look at them, you will see they’re like something out of Bond, and in fact, in the latest Bond film…
Gordon Sanghera
There was some DNA sequencing that looked a little bit like the MinION 1C.
Elliot Moss
Right, so, here we now seventeen years later, these things are real, the world of, you know, science fiction has become science fact. Just tell me two or three things that took you from that moment in the pub to where we are now that were pivotal.
Gordon Sanghera
Sure. So, getting that half million really important, we were able to look at what we’d done with the glucose thing and produce a little plastic chip and show that we can miniaturise it all and take it away from the preserve of a very sophisticated post-doctoral researcher, to a little device that you could… a bit like glucose testing and we had that proof of concept and with that, we went off to raise and we raised seven and a half million pounds but we were very honest and I mean so I had never done a start-up before, I knew how to make technology work but I don’t have an MBA or anything like that but we went in and said this can take five to seven years, probably cost three or four hundred million pounds, which at the time was very disheartening because we just, you know, a lot of people laughed us out of court but it was an interesting filtering process so we ended up with Patient Capital, which everybody talks about today, in 2006/2007 it wasn’t even a thing but we, you got these real, real important visionaries who said, “I like this. This could really change the world.” They’d put the Prof on the spot, so Spike, the Prof and I would go out on these roadshows and they’d say, “can we do DNA sequencing?” We had all these projects we could do and that was the hardest and he said, “yeah, it’s possible” and that was it so we got funded for that and three years in, everything we’d done, didn’t work so we had a real tough moment where we had to switch gears and we’d funded research in the Prof’s lab and in California and literally in the same month, they made two iconic breakthroughs. On the future stuff, we were thinking that’s next generation because the stuff we were doing was going to work and they had failed and we were staring at this and thinking this is all going to come to an end. In that same month, in like 2009, over Christmas, these two breakthroughs came and within 90 days, it started working. So all the stuff we’d done for chemistry A, if you like, we just plugged it into chemistry B and we were off to the races.
Elliot Moss
Can I ask about this because obviously you get to that point, three years in, and you go we’re going to give up and obviously tenacity kicks in and resilience and all those other things but in terms of the actual science, was it simply, and obviously as a non-scientist here, is it just trial and error or was it something magical?
Gordon Sanghera
It is, a lot of it is really just like in industry, it is trial and error and you just gotta keep going.
Elliot Moss
Keep tweaking, keep tweaking, keep tweaking.
Gordon Sanghera
Push, push, push until the dam breaks. But you do need, you know, we’d funded this research so it was partly by design but you do need to be in the right place at the right time and, you know, those academics had been working at this for fifteen years and it just somehow, there’s this catalisis that happens, the company is there, they’ve got more impetus, we’ve got more impetus and it does create the perfect storm so there’s a little bit of happenstance and luck but a lot of it is, if you pour money into something, it can make it happen.
Elliot Moss
It comes. And just briefly, before we go into our final chat and a bit more music. What’s the feeling like when that Christmas, going back to 2009 and you know the breakthroughs have come, for you, if you can remember the emotion?
Gordon Sanghera
Oh I do. The mantra used to be, “We’ll sequence by Christmas” to investors, we just never say which Christmas it was going to be and it was like just after Christmas but it was unbelievable and if you fast forward to 2012, we went to a conference in Florida where all the great and good of genomics go and our CTO, Clive Brown, gave a talk and showed the proof of concept, because this idea had been around for twenty years from the academics. He showed the proof of concept and it was phenomenal, it wiped off almost a billion on the market cap of the other and I remember standing on that balcony in Florida with the academics and having a glass of champagne and Professor Dan Branton at Harvard, who had just had his ninetieth birthday a few weeks ago, he said, “Gordon, savour this moment” and I’ve never forgotten that balcony. So that three years then from it working to that moment was quite, quite a great, it was a great journey, so much fun, there was only about 60 of us, you knew everybody by their first names, it was so good.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for my final chat with Gordon Sanghera. We’ve got a touch of Mardi Gras for Lonnie Liston Smith as well. That’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Just for a few more minutes, my brilliant guest today, Gordon Sanghera is with me. So, fast forward, 2022, you float last year, you got a market cap of three and a half billion pounds give or take, depending on which day and what time it is, Gordon obviously, as we know the wonderful nature of being a public company, you’ve gone from 60 people to 800 people, give or take, that thing you said to me stuck and I want to ask you about how that’s going for you. You said you wanted to make an impact. You said you wanted to make a difference. Just give me a sense of how that just as an example of how that’s happening right now.
Gordon Sanghera
Yeah, so, a couple of weeks ago at Stamford, somebody took our platform. So, today you’ve been looking at the handheld devices and in sort of using computing as an analogy, this is like a handheld or a desktop but we have a high density, super computer as well, which is primarily used for large projects such as whole human genome sequencing and that device can sequence 48 genomes in four days, for less than $500. Remember I talked about 10 years, 3 billion, that’s what it took, that’s the pace of innovation but what you can also do, is instead of doing 48 genomes over four days, you could do one across all 48 channels and that’s what Stamford did with 15 really hard to diagnose patients, critical care patients, and half of them they were able to go from blood sample to actionable clinical data, same day and the sequencing time on that was 2 hours. So, that just tells you we are rapidly heading into the genomic era and, you know, this is just the first of many, many breakthroughs in medicine that will happen and it’s just so humbling and so, I’m so proud to be part of this revolution that these amazing researchers are now applying. It’s great.
Elliot Moss
And this genomic era that we’re hurtling towards now, what else, what else if we were forecasting, if we were having this chat in ten years, what else is going to be a tick, we’ve done that?
Gordon Sanghera
So we’ve got, so gene editing is happening now which is great.
Elliot Moss
That’s the crystal stuff, that’s the whole… amazing.
Gordon Sanghera
Indeed. So, you know, we talk about mutations in Covid-19, right? You could undo them.
Elliot Moss
So the dychen’s issue could be addressed through the crystal technology?
Gordon Sanghera
That’s right. And so, doing that editing and checking it’s alright. So, reassuring people that it’s, you know, not going to get out of control I think is really important but we talked about infectious disease Covid but plant pathogens, real problem for you know food, security and safety… I think this pandemic has now resulted in everybody thinking about surveillance continually, all the time and antimicrobial resistance, over-prescription of antibiotics is something we are all going to have to stop doing and get used to testing for say actually antibiotics aren’t going to help. Beyond that there’s a whole lifestyle thing, personalised training, it already happens at elite sports level, you know, look at people’s DNA and their propensity to high intensity training or whatever it is, tailoring it, tailored diets, tailored skin products, this is all coming, people are more and more understanding the source code and all the organisms that live in us and on us and it’s going to be really exciting, it’s the future.
Elliot Moss
Will Swindon Town win the Premiership one day with your help? That’s the question though.
Gordon Sanghera
No, I don’t think so.
Elliot Moss
Thought I’d ask. It’s been really lovely talking to you Gordon, thank you and amazing, kind of mind-blowing and phenomenal, that stat from it took ten years to it takes two hours, I think kind of makes the point. Just before I let you go, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Gordon Sanghera
So, I came to Jazz and Soul and Funk through Punk and through really, Paul Weller, who’s been a constant in my life and he’s mellowed over the years and so has my musical taste but very early on, he covered Move On Up, that really led me into a journey towards Jazz, Soul and Funk. Curtis Mayfield, Otis Reading, I mean that was it, it just opened up a whole new thing for me and it’s been a mantra of my life, at 42 I left MediSense and my dad thought I’d gone mad but it was all about one more adventure and Move On Up and recently, somebody asked me as we IPO’d, was I going to head off into the sunset? I said are you joking, this is the beginning of the fun, you know, the use cases are going to come so it’s always move on up.
Elliot Moss
That was Curtis Mayfield with Move On Up, the song choice of my fantastic Business Shaper today, Gordon Sanghera. Message to everybody, go with your instincts from a young age. It’s a long way forward and you may as well choose the thing you really want to do and are passionate about. He talked about wanting to make a really big difference and an impact on the world. Real world use of the clever things and the clever stuff that he has been thinking about for much of his academic life and now in his business life. And finally, the fact that he said he was proud to be part of this genomic revolution, it says everything you need to know about the man and the thing he’s trying to achieve. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
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