BD to acquire SCG start-up Cellular Research amidst a market trend to provide integrated workflows

DeciBio August 26, 2015: Yesterday, BD Life Sciences announced completion of their acquisition of Cellular Research, an emerging single cell genomics start up based in San Francisco. Cellular Research has been quietly working to address key unmet needs of single cell genomics researchers. This acquisition is symptomatic of the increasing competition in this attractive market, historically dominated by one commercial player, Fluidigm.An important market trend is emerging; customers want a comprehensive workflow from single cell isolation to preparation for downstream applications. This acquisition accomplishes that in part. Linda Tharby, executive vice president and president of BD Life Sciences echoed this sentiment. “The acquisition of Cellular Research, combined with our existing cell sorting technology, will provide our customers with a more complete and simplified workflow solution for single cell analysis.”BD is a global leader in cell sorting technologies via its extensive flow cytometry portfolio. Their well-known single cell sorting platform, BD FACS is a powerful platform with a considerable customer base. Cellular Research brings important advances to the table in single cell genomic technologies, including Molecular Indexing, a method that allows for the detection and absolute quantification of individual mRNA molecules in single cells. In this system, the random barcode labelling of mRNA generates a unique cDNA library ready for direct analysis or comparison across different platforms with no sampling bias or error.Combining expertise along with these platforms is a step in addressing key unmet needs in this emerging field. Stephen Fodor, Ph.D., chief executive officer and co-founder of Cellular Research acknowledged his excitement “about the possibilities we can offer researchers by combining our expertise, [we] believe it has the potential to meet several unmet needs in single cell genomics research.”One of those unmet needs is scalability, which Cellular has begun to address along with a number of other research groups. Another promising technique is Drop-seq, which comes from the McCarroll group at Harvard. We will likely see more deals in these next few years around commercialization of this and other promising techniques.This BD deal appears to be the culmination of a number of events earlier this year. In February Cellular published a proof of principle paper in Science, and announced plans to launch the Resolve system for massively parallel RNA-sequencing using their proprietary Molecular Indexing technique. The same month BD announced a co-marketing partnership with Cellular Research to offer customers an integrated workflow in single cell sequencing, taking advantage of their BD FACS platform and Cellular Researches’ Precise assay. “The combination of the Precise Assays and the BD FACS technology is revolutionary in that for the first time it enables both phenotypic and genotypic data to be obtain from single cells in a simple and high throughput fashion. This is something that is quite powerful and unique in this market,” said Director of Strategic Marketing, Martin Pieprzyk. Together these events suggest major movements are coming in the SCG market over the next 5 years.For an in-depth analysis on the SCG market see DeciBio’s single cell genomics market report, with information on market size, segmentation, growth, competition and trends. A 2015 update will be available in the upcoming months.Disclaimer: Some of the companies listed above may be DeciBio clients or customers.

Author: Miguel Edwards, Associate at DeciBio Consulting, LLCedwards@decibio.comConnect with Miguel on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/miguelvedwards