What's the New CEO Like?
This year's London Calling is the first time the user community will get a good look at new CEO Francis Van Parys. He's scheduled to both open and close the meeting, just as previous CEO Gordon Sanghera did. Will his walkup music be punk? Will he call me out for tweeting during the presentation as Sanghera did last year?
Sanghera had a distinct style, and I wouldn't expect Van Parys to copy it. So what will be his style? How accessible will he be during the meeting?
Clinic! Clinic! Clinic!
The agenda makes it very clear: ONT wants you to know it is relevant in human clinical medicine. Of the outside speakers who get the coveted main stage time, I believe only two have titles that aren't explicitly clinical - one is on joint transcriptome and proteome monitoring (first look at ONT's proteomics in the field?) and one is on human genome diversity.
So no mainstage talks on wildlife conservation or plant genomics or the other fascinating, non-clinical areas where ONT has often had focus in the past. There's still some sessions in the Breakouts, Secret Cinema, and the like - though those also seem more likely than not to have "clinical" or the name of a disease in the title
ONT Still Has A Deep Technical Bench
The always intensely anticipated Oxford Nanopore tech update session on Wednesday evening includes a number of faces who haven't appeared in such presentations in the past, but who illustrate the deep technical bench ONT has developed. Each time I checked on LinkedIn, the individual had been with the company since before the original MinION Access Program. There are sometimes fears among the faithful that strains of that other sequencing company with UK roots (aka the Evil Empire) might be slipping in; apparently a number of hires over the last few years on the commercial side have that stain on their resume. Of course, that is also the stain of a significant degree commercial success, which is why they are in demand.
More Hardware Lineup Revamping?
Will we see significant reshapings of the hardware lineup announced? ONT has been excising a number of hardware elements, trying for a slimmer portfolio to improve customer messaging and support. So instruments loved - the P2 Solo (no, I wasn't bold enough to bring a Save The Solo pin to the meeting) - and not yet loved - ElysION - have been axed. Someone I chatted with on Monday who wanted to go to the meeting but was unable to arrange it commented that the PromethION P24 has been around a long time, and the P48 model doesn't really perform well - can't actually crank all 48 flowcells and keep up with the basecalling. GridION and P2 are a bit of a product overlap.
A truly big leap in this space would be to consolidate the two incompatible hardware product lines. PromethION would likely be the winning form factor, at least for flowcells. Lopping off GridION might not be a difficult call; killing MinION altogether would cause quite a shock to the fanbase. Could a P1 plus "nerfed" flowcells in the PromethION format but delivering far fewer pores be something the company would ever consider to continue serving cost-conscious markets? Will anything ever come from the R&D investment in new generation ASICs that were supposed to power tiny, inexpensive devices?
How Much Love for Direct RNA?
Direct RNA sequencing is a unique aspect to the Oxford Nanopore platform that nobody else can touch - but my quick scan of the agenda didn't spot any emphasis on it. Just a quiet year, or being slowly phased out? Of course, I may be grossly overreading the tea leaves here
How Much on Proteomics?
As mentioned above, there's one talk that mentions proteomes - is this a big unveiling of the ONT proteomics technology in the field or something else? What is the status of ONT's efforts to send peptides or entire proteins through pores?
More Engagement With Commercial Partners
ONT's thaw towards other companies seems to be continuing. Once, it was unheard of for any other company to have any presence at London Calling beyond having delegates and perhaps being mentioned for a specific kit. Now I see that seqWell will be having a poster to announce a new barcoding scheme to enable extremely high multiplexing of samples. That is precisely the sort of wet lab functionality that ONT has jealously protected in the past as exclusively their own - and almost certainly peppered their commercial foot badly by such hoarding given that they weren't actually delivering the goods. Playing nicely with others - is this here to stay?
Ditto for long read RNA library prep company ArgenTag - another example of ONT letting companies inside the walled garden that would have previously been viewed with downright hostility - particularly since these companies produce kits for both long read platforms. And a gaggle of other companies have announced they will have a presence - Syndex with their methylation-preserving PCR, NimaGen with their reverse complement PCR. That alone is amazing - ONT was often emphasizing that most of their protocols had not PCR and didn't give much time on their few PCR schemes. Diagnostics developer 4Bases SA. Clinical software developer Genomiz. LIMS company OnQ. Sample and library prep automator Volta Labs.
Plus I see many international distributors co-promoting the conference. I'm not sure if that is entirely new - wasn't always searching on hashtag (and it's interesting how many unrelated posts come up with #LondonCalling2026 )
Some of the LinkedIn messages seem to suggest there is a special online area for the partners - virtual booths. That would be a serious change! But, I find no trace of partners in the online conference site or within the conference app. That may be me being a bit blind, but it would hardly surprise me if giving time to other companies is still not fully embraced at ONT and the idea of going all out to build a collaborative ecosystem was still considered borderline heresy.
Coda
Want to challenge any of my propositions? Call me out for complete inaccuracies? Critique my photography of Old Billingsgate? Or drop some juicy tips? I'll be around for both days of the conference, though disappearing at the end rather promptly for the last flight back to Boston on Thursday
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