Oxford Nanopore brings in Philips' Sebastian Kronmueller to run business development

Oxford Nanopore Technologies has appointed Sebastian Kronmueller as its chief business development officer. He will be based in the US and starts on 4 January 2027, the company said in a stock exchange announcement on 20 October.

The role

Kronmueller will run Oxford Nanopore's strategy and business development functions, partnerships included, and will drive its key strategic initiatives. He arrives from Philips, where he was head of strategy and ventures with responsibility for global strategy and inorganic activity such as deals. Before that he spent more than ten years at Siemens Healthineers in senior strategy, business development and operational roles, latterly leading strategy and transformation for its global diagnostics business.

Putting the job in the US rather than at the Oxford headquarters says something about where the company expects its next deals to come from. Partnerships with labs, health systems and industry customers are how sequencing platforms get embedded in routine testing, and having the person who leads them on the ground matters.

Kronmueller has not yet set out his plans in detail. What is clear is that strategy and partnerships now sit together under one senior, US-based leader with a diagnostics background.

A team in transition

The hire fits a wider reshaping at the top. The company's newsroom carries two announcements on strengthening its executive leadership team, as well as a piece in which chief executive Francis Van Parys sets out its priorities for customers in what it calls its next phase of growth.

The same newsroom shows where that growth is aimed. Oxford Nanopore has joined RISE, a global rare disease network, to widen access to genomic testing, and its technology is supporting an NHS pilot of rapid genomic testing for brain tumours. It has also won the MacRobert Award for engineering innovation.

The numbers

Investors took the news calmly. Shares were at 204.60p on the day of the announcement, 2.2% lower in London, but 45% higher than a year earlier, according to Alliance News.

The bigger picture

Competition among sequencing platforms is heating up, and much of it is about clinical use rather than research. Roche, for example, introduced AXELIOS 1 in June, a platform built on its Sequencing by Expansion technology. It is currently for research use only, though Roche has said it could open up future clinical applications. In that market, platform companies win on partnerships as much as on chemistry, which is why a senior business development hire with a strategy and ventures background is worth noting.