With a trio of partnership announcements this month, 10x Genomics has signaled it is looking beyond its traditional focus on research tools for academic, government, and industry customers, by expanding into clinical diagnostics through collaborations with top-tier institutions aimed at generating scientific evidence intended to develop the clinical potential of the company’s single-cell and spatial biology technologies. 10x announced clinical collaborations with two Boston-based institutions, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, as well as the New York-based Cancer Research Institute. The company also committed to building its own CLIA-certified laboratory within about a year, with the goal of enabling clinical deployment of diagnostics that will come up with these kinds of collaborations. The clinical moves hold potential for an expansion of the company’s customer base and thus more business for 10x, which is now the second largest publicly traded spatial biology company, as ranked by GEN, and a leading developer of instruments, reagents, and software used for spatial and single-cell biology. “Over the course of the past year, we have had physicians who have been telling us, ‘If you guys offer single cell and spatial in a CLIA lab for patient testing, it would be a game changer for me to be able to send patient samples to you.’ So, the signal from the market is clearly there—there’s potential,” 10x co-founder and CEO Serge Saxonov, PhD, told GEN in an interview during the recent J.P. Morgan 44th Annual Healthcare Conference in San Francisco. Saxonov also said his company’s expansion into clinical diagnostics was…
