Rich Compton on his first 100 days at OBD

Last updated: 14 Oct 2026

We sat down with Rich Compton as he marks his first 100 days as CEO of Oxford BioDynamics. Rich joined OBD after almost a decade at Oxford Nanopore, and before that with Illumina, helping to build the sequencing market. His first months at OBD's helm have included a £9.15 million fundraise in August, and a renewed focus on driving EpiSwitch® Orion, OBD's cloud-based computational platform which predicts 3D genome architecture from whole genome sequence, into a commercial platform. We asked him what has surprised him most about OBD from the inside, what has been hardest, how he decides what to prioritise, and what success will look like a year from now.

Q: What's the most surprising thing you've learned about OBD from the inside, something you couldn't have known before you started?

A: The sheer amount of biology already sitting inside the company, and how much it can do.

For nearly 20 years, OBD has been measuring how the genome is physically organised in real patient samples. That work has built a knowledgebase of around 1.5 billion data points from more than 17,000 samples across over 40 disease areas.

Before I joined, I understood OBD about as well as most people in genomics, which is to say not very well at all! I had not appreciated the discovery capability, which can find disease and treatment-response signatures in 3D genome architecture. Nor had I appreciated the company's ability to turn those signatures into simple blood tests that run on standard laboratory equipment.

Most of that data was generated to answer a particular question for a particular project. We can now use that accumulated knowledge much more broadly. It underpins EpiSwitch Explorer, our high-throughput discovery platform, which simultaneously measures millions of 3D chromosome contacts to find those that differ between patients and healthy individuals. It also gives Orion the empirical biology needed to computationally predict regulatory architecture from whole genome sequence.

There is far more here to commercialise than I understood when I took the job.

Q: Why did you want this job, and has that reason held up now you're in post?

A: I spent twelve years at Illumina and Oxford Nanopore helping build the sequencing market. We became extraordinarily good at generating genomes cheaply, and much less successful at explaining them.

A large proportion of disease-associated genetic variation sits outside protein-coding genes. Those regions control when genes are switched on and off, often by interacting with parts of the genome that are a long way away on the linear sequence.

Your genome wasn't born flat. Inside the cell, the genome is folded, bringing regulatory elements and genes into physical proximity; this is what the industry refers to as 3D genome architecture. OBD has spent twenty years measuring how it folds and which regions it brings together. That was what attracted me to the company.

If anything, the first 100 days have made the gap look larger and the commercial route clearer.

Q: What's been the hardest part of your first 100 days as CEO?

A: The financing. We raised £9.15 million in August. It secured the company's working capital position, but it came with substantial dilution for shareholders who had already supported OBD for a long time.

The responsibility now is to use that capital differently. Projects need defined commercial outcomes, costs, milestones and stopping points. Science has to produce evidence, and evidence has to lead to products, partnerships or revenue.

Shareholders funded that reset, and we owe them delivery against it.

Q: How would you describe your leadership style, and has anything about OBD's culture made you adapt it?

A: Direct, commercially led and quite impatient with activity that does not lead to a decision.

OBD has very deep scientific expertise and people who have spent years building an unusually rich body of biological data.

Investment now starts with the commercial and financial case, followed by the scientific case and then the technical plan. We agree what success looks like, what it will cost and what would make us stop before we begin.

That discipline is good for the science too. It puts resources behind programmes capable of changing clinical practice or creating commercial value, and stops weaker projects consuming them indefinitely.

Q: OBD has historically been known for building clinical tests. Is that still how you see the company?

A: Clinical tests remain an important part of the company and are one output from a broader platform. We now have two routes into the same biology: one computational, starting from what your genome predicts, and one laboratory-based, starting from what your blood reveals.

EpiSwitch Explorer measures 3D genome architecture directly in blood. That allows us to discover signatures associated with disease, treatment response and other biological states. Those signatures can ultimately be distilled into simple clinical tests such as PSE for prostate cancer and CiRT for immunotherapy response.

Orion approaches the problem from the other direction. It predicts regulatory architecture from whole genome sequence and allows us to interrogate genomic datasets that have already been generated.

Orion lets us go back into existing genomic data and ask questions that could not be asked when those genomes were originally sequenced.

Orion was already being developed when I arrived. My decision was to make it a fully commercial platform rather than treating it principally as another internal research capability.

Q: There are millions of genomes and biological samples stored around the world. What makes you think OBD can find something new in them?

A: Because sequence is only part of the information.

A biobank containing blood samples and a database containing whole genome sequences are different assets. Explorer can interrogate the first. Orion can interrogate the second.

Genomics has been extraordinarily successful at finding variants associated with disease. The harder problem is understanding what many of those variants do, particularly when they sit outside genes.

Much of the genome's regulation happens through its three-dimensional structure. Regulatory regions that may be hundreds of thousands of bases apart on the sequence can be brought together physically inside the nucleus.

OBD has spent nearly 20 years measuring those interactions experimentally. That empirical knowledge is difficult to recreate and gives us a route into the regulatory information contained within existing genomic cohorts.

We have started demonstrating that in external data. In work published this year, five fatigue-related conditions with relatively little overlap at the gene level converged on shared regulatory biology when examined through 3D genome architecture.

Q: What has convinced you personally that this technology is ready for its moment rather than being another promising genomics platform?

A: The data and the market have caught up with the science.

We now have population-scale whole genome datasets containing hundreds of thousands of participants. UK Biobank, All of Us and national genomics programmes have created an extraordinary resource.

At the same time, the industry is learning that sequence alone does not answer every biological question. Proteomics, methylation and other layers are being added to these cohorts because each reveals information that was invisible in the original dataset.

3D genome architecture is another of those layers, and Orion may allow us to recover some of that information computationally from whole genome data that already exists.

The test now is external. Can we take somebody else's cohort, make useful predictions and generate biology that survives independent scrutiny?

We are running that test now, on external cohorts, with the groups who hold them.

Q: Genomics research can produce findings that look exciting but do not hold up to scrutiny. As CEO, how do you decide what to back and what to be cautious about?

A: Independent validation. The second test is commercial. Who makes a different decision because they have this information?

That could be a clinician deciding whether somebody needs an MRI, a pharmaceutical company selecting patients for a trial, or a researcher trying to understand the biology behind a genetic association.

If nobody makes a different decision, it may still be good science. It is not where a small commercial company should put its capital.

Q: What would success look like to you a year from now, not a specific number, but what would it look like for this to be working?

A: We would have converted more of the science into things that other organisations use and pay for.

Our colorectal cancer programme and other late-stage signatures would have gone through independent assessment. PSE would be progressing through the markets and partners we have prioritised. CiRT would be generating further clinical and commercial evidence.

Orion would have moved beyond first projects. The important signal will be partners coming back with a second question because the first piece of work produced something they could use.

Today I spend a lot of my time explaining what 3D genomics is. A year from now I want to be spending it on what people want to do with it.