On 8 July, HRH The Princess Royal presented Oxford Nanopore Technologies with the 2026 MacRobert Award. The gold medal and £50,000 prize recognise the most outstanding engineering innovation in the United Kingdom. This year, the award honours a technology capable of reading DNA and RNA in real time, anywhere, with a device compact enough to fit in a coat pocket.
The Oxford Nanopore MacRobert Award recognises over twenty years of development in nanopore-sensing technology. The company’s sequencers operate by threading DNA or RNA strands through a protein nanopore within an electrically resistant membrane. Each nucleotide disrupts the ionic current in a unique way, which a computer algorithm interprets to reconstruct the genetic sequence in real time.
This technology stands out for its portability and speed. Earlier DNA sequencers were large, expensive, and slow, often taking days or weeks to deliver results. In contrast, Oxford Nanopore’s MinION device weighs less than 100 grams, connects to a laptop via USB, and can generate sequence data within minutes. It has been deployed on the International Space Station, in field clinics during outbreaks, and in remote biodiversity surveys without laboratory access.
The MacRobert Award, established over 55 years ago, is one of the UK’s longest-standing engineering prizes. Past recipients include the teams behind the Rolls-Royce Pegasus engine, the CT scanner, and the catalytic converter. Oxford Nanopore now joins this distinguished list of innovators.
This year’s shortlist featured WeWALK, a smart cane for visually impaired users with integrated obstacle detection and navigation, and Transmission Dynamics, which developed systems for monitoring power transmission networks. Both demonstrated strong engineering merit, but Oxford Nanopore’s global impact and technical originality set it apart.
The technology’s practical impact is evident in infectious disease response. Rapid pathogen identification is critical during outbreaks, yet traditional laboratory methods can take weeks. Oxford Nanopore’s sequencers reduce identification times to hours and have been used to track Ebola, Zika, and COVID-19 in environments where other sequencing technologies are not feasible.
Nanopore sensing originated in the 1990s, when researchers showed that individual molecules could be detected passing through biological pores. Commercialising this discovery required advances in protein engineering, signal processing, and materials science. Founded in 2005 as a University of Oxford spin-out, Oxford Nanopore spent years developing suitable pores, highly sensitive electronics, and robust signal interpretation algorithms.
Oxford Nanopore’s instruments are now installed in over 120 countries. The technology is applied in healthcare, food safety testing, environmental monitoring, and agricultural genomics. The PromethION platform, a high-throughput instrument, produces terabases of sequence data and competes with established platforms such as Illumina.
Engineering Deep Dive
At the core of Oxford Nanopore’s technology is a biological nanopore, usually a modified CsgG protein derived from E. coli. This protein forms a barrel-shaped channel about 1 nanometre wide at its narrowest point. The pore is embedded in a synthetic polymer membrane separating two electrolyte-filled chambers. Applying a voltage across the membrane causes ions to flow through the pore, generating a measurable current of 100 to 200 picoamperes.
A motor protein, such as a helicase, feeds the DNA strand through the pore at a controlled speed. Each nucleotide base uniquely alters the ionic current, and modified bases like methylcytosine also produce distinct signatures. Because multiple nucleotides occupy the pore simultaneously, the current reflects a k-mer of 5 to 6 bases, resulting in a complex signal that requires computational decoding.
Custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) on the flow cell manage signal processing. Each flow cell contains up to 2,048 individually addressable nanopores, each with its own sensing electrode and amplifier. The ASIC samples the current at several kilohertz and digitises the signal for computer transmission. A single flow cell can generate over 1 gigabyte of raw signal data per hour.
Basecalling, which converts raw current signals into nucleotide sequences, now relies on deep neural networks. Earlier methods used hidden Markov models, but the field has advanced to recurrent, convolutional, and transformer-based architectures. These models are trained on millions of known sequences and current traces. Basecalling accuracy has improved from about 85 percent initially to over 99 percent with current algorithms and chemistry.
The motor protein controlling DNA translocation is an engineered enzyme, often a phi29-derived polymerase or a helicase modified for processivity and speed control. It must move DNA through the pore slowly enough for electronic resolution, typically 400 to 450 bases per second, while maintaining enough force to counter the electrophoretic drive. Achieving the necessary stability, speed, and membrane compatibility required extensive directed evolution and rational protein design.
The synthetic membrane is a critical component. It must be electrically insulating, mechanically stable, and compatible with biological pore proteins. Oxford Nanopore uses proprietary polymer membranes formed directly on the flow cell surface. The process must yield a uniform, defect-free bilayer, as defects can cause current leaks and reduce signal quality.
Scaling quality control is a significant manufacturing challenge. Each flow cell must contain a minimum number of active, correctly inserted pores to meet specifications. Functional pore yield depends on membrane quality, insertion efficiency, and the stability of the motor protein-pore complex. Oxford Nanopore has refined its Oxford-based manufacturing processes over years to achieve the consistency needed for global distribution.
Oxford Nanopore’s future goals include ultra-long read sequencing, capable of spanning entire genes or chromosomes without fragmentation, and real-time epigenetic analysis. The MacRobert Award, with its long-standing history, affirms what scientists and clinicians have recognised for years: this technology has fundamentally transformed genomics.
- Oxford Nanopore Technologies won the 2026 MacRobert Award, the UK’s top engineering innovation prize, presented by The Princess Royal
- Its pocket-sized DNA sequencers read genetic material in real time and have been used on the ISS and during global disease outbreaks
- The technology can identify pathogens in hours instead of weeks, with devices now in over 120 countries
