Ontera

Ontera, Inc., which was called Two Pore Guys until May 2019, is a company in Santa Cruz, California, that builds sensors around nanopores etched in silicon. It was founded in 2011 on a design from the University of California, Santa Cruz in which two pores sit in series, one to sense a molecule and one to control it.^[1] The company aimed first at handheld medical tests, then at crop diagnostics, and in 2020 it spun out a second company, Nooma Bio, to take the dual-pore technology toward genome mapping.^[2][3]

William Dunbar, then at UC Santa Cruz, conceived the idea around 2010 after learning of the nanopore sequencing work of the UCSC professors David Deamer and Mark Akeson, which used protein pores. Dunbar's design used a silicon nanopore in place of a biological one and added a second pore, so that one pore could act as the sensor and the other as an actuator that slowed and controlled the molecule between them.^[1] A patent on the arrangement, "Dual-pore device", names Dunbar and a co-inventor. Its priority date is July 20, 2011 and it was granted on February 24, 2015 to the University of California.^[4] It describes a device with three chambers, an electrode in each, joined by two pores 1 to 100 nm in diameter and 10 to 1,000 nm apart.^[4]

The UC Santa Cruz alumni magazine called Two Pore Guys a "tongue-in-cheek name".^[1] Kent Kemmish, the founder of Molecular Reality, wrote in 2026 that the premise was first explored "by two literally poor academics", a pun that he called "not the best pun ever made, but it was wholesome".^[5]

By October 2017 the company had about 60 employees, more than half of them from UC Santa Cruz, and it described a palm-sized handheld device that read disposable strips carrying reagents. It developed tests together with partners, who sold them under their own names, and the magazine counted more than 30 tests developed, five partners under contract and 15 more in negotiation. A pilot at the University of California, San Francisco was testing the platform for the KRAS G12D mutation in blood and urine.^[1]

On May 9, 2019 Two Pore Guys became Ontera, to reflect a broader mission of "providing better biological information for a healthier planet". The announcement named a new chief executive and a senior vice president of engineering and put sustainable agriculture first: a field platform that would identify and quantify crop traits, pathogens and pathogen resistance in under 20 minutes.^[2] On June 18, 2019 the company announced a contract from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, worth $982,593, to develop a genotyping test for Zika virus that would return a result in minutes at the point of testing and require no laboratory.^[6] On August 7 it announced a research collaboration with BASF to detect plant diseases and resistance with its silicon nanopore sensors, still in the research phase, with field trials planned for later.^[7]

In August 2020 Ontera spun out Nooma Bio, with Ontera's chief executive and Dunbar, its chief technology officer, leading the new company while keeping their roles. Ontera kept "single silicon-nanopore technology for in-field precision diagnostics".^[3]

Two papers from the company, with a physics group at McGill University, set out what the two pores can do together. The first, in June 2019, created a "tug-of-war": two independently controlled pores catch the same DNA molecule and apply opposing voltages, which slows the strand.^[8] A second, at the end of that year, described what the authors called flossing. A protein-tagged λ-DNA molecule of 48.5 kb was trapped between the pores and scanned electrically back and forth hundreds of times in a few seconds.^[9] The method has its own article, Molecular flossing.

Ontera is the nearest relation to Molecular Reality Corporation among the nanopore companies, and Kemmish says so in the March 2026 post "Flossing with DNA". He lists Two Pore Guys with Roswell Biotechnologies and his own demonpore, inc. as "one of the three coolest/quirkiest names for a genomic tech startup ever", and notes that "Two Pore Guys now has the ineffably unexciting name Ontera, Inc."^[5]

On the science he writes that the work "sounds so similar to demonpore's approach" that a reader might ask why the group "almost did what we did, but not quite". The answer he offers is that the pores were left apart: "They were just a few microns away from it!" The patent describes pores 10 to 1,000 nm apart, and the 2022 paper from the spinout reports about 500 nm.^[5][4][10] He closes the passage with an offer: "I would love to talk to Dunbar et al."^[5]

In The Hole World, the company's atlas of molecular-sensing groups, Ontera is listed in Santa Cruz and drawn with a pore labelled "Point-of-need sensing".^[11]

• List of nanopore companies
• Molecular flossing
• Solid-state nanopore