Longas Technologies

Longas Technologies Pty Ltd operates within the biotechnology sector, specifically focusing on the Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) market. The company was established in 2015 as a spin-out from the ithree institute at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). Its founding was the result of research initially led by computational biologist Professor Aaron Darling, who was joined by co-founders Dr Catherine Burke and Professor Ian Charles. The company operated in stealth mode until its public launch in May 2019.

The development of Longas' core technology was driven by the founders' work in microbial community profiling, where they identified a need for better sequence resolution. This led to the creation of Morphoseq™, a technology designed to significantly enhance the performance of standard short-read NGS platforms. Professor Darling, who also serves as the Chief Scientific Officer, led the development team. The company is backed by funding from Australia's Medical Research Commercialisation Fund (MRCF), managed by Brandon Capital, as well as investments from its founders and directors. In a significant milestone, Longas appointed Nick McCooke as CEO in 2019 to spearhead commercialization efforts; McCooke was previously the founding CEO of Solexa, the company that pioneered the NGS technology later acquired by Illumina.

Longas Technologies' business model centers on providing its proprietary Morphoseq™ technology to clients in the research, epidemiology, and clinical genomics fields. The product consists of a chemistry kit and a cloud-based bioinformatics software pipeline. Morphoseq™ addresses a key limitation of widely used short-read sequencers: their difficulty in accurately assembling long, repetitive sections of a genome. The technology works by using a chemical process to create unique identifiers on long DNA molecules before they are sequenced. Sophisticated algorithms then use these identifiers to reconstruct highly accurate, long-read sequences from the short-read data. This process effectively transforms a standard short-read sequencer into a 'virtual long-read' sequencer. The key benefits for clients include obtaining high-quality long-read DNA sequencing data at a fraction of the cost of dedicated long-read platforms, with the convenience of using their existing short-read equipment and standard molecular biology consumables. The company, which was based in Sydney, Australia, has since been sold in an undisclosed transaction.

Keywords: Next Generation Sequencing, long-read sequencing, DNA sequencing technology, Morphoseq, virtual long-read, genome assembly, computational biology, genomics, bioinformatics software, molecular diagnostics, biotechnology, microbial genomics, clinical genomics, DNA library preparation, sequencing chemistry, Medical Research Commercialisation Fund, University of Technology Sydney, Aaron Darling, Nick McCooke