At present, the market share of DNA sequencing equipment is taken by multinational enterprises such as Illumina, Thermo Fisher, and Roche. The business value of Axbio will be immeasurable if its fourth-generation sequencing technology can be successfully industrialized.
Fourth‐generation sequencing technology company Axbio (Chinese: 安序源) completed a Series B funding round worth nearly USD 100 million. The financing was jointly led by Global Health Investment Fund created by CICC&AstraZeneca and Yunfeng Capital (Chinese: 云锋基金), followed by CBC Group (Chinese: 康桥资本), SDIC Fund (Chinese: 国投招商) and 5Y Capital (Chinese: 五源资本).
The fund will be used to optimize the sequencing technology, build the production base, and pave the way for commercialization.
Dr. Tianhui, the founder of Axbio, said that their self-developed fourth-generation sequencers are based on large-scale integrated circuits and cutting-edge biotechnology. And have the significant advantages of low cost, miniaturization, high throughput, and ultralong reads, and can provide repeatable sequencing at the single-molecule level.
The upstream processing equipment for gene detection in China is dominated by global giants such as Illumina and Thermo Fisher. Most Chinese enterprises distribute the production of DNA sequencing equipment through OEM (Original Entrusted Manufacture), acquisition, or cooperative research and development.
NGS (next-generation sequencing) is the most widely used sequencing technology currently. However，its sequencing reading length is much shorter than that of the first-generation sequencing technology. Third and fourth-generation sequencing is still used in scientific research and has not been popularized on a large scale.
At present, companies involved in the fourth generation of sequencing technology include Oxford Nanopore Technologies and Qitan Tech (Chinese: 齐碳科技).