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Dive Overview:
- Illumina bought Fluent Biosciences announced Tuesday that it is adding single-cell analysis technology to its portfolio.
- Illumina said in its announcement that Fluent's technology is designed to generate large single-cell libraries at a relatively low cost, while eliminating the need for complex, expensive equipment and microfluidic consumables.
- The kit will compete with products from companies such as Illumina partner 10x Genomics, and Illumina said it remains an open sequencing platform and will support its existing partnerships.
Dive Insights:
10x has helped establish single-cell RNA sequencing as a core part of the research toolkit. It introduced The company launched its Chrome equipment in 2016. Concluded In the same year, the company signed a co-marketing agreement with Illumina for linked-read sequencing.
As the market has expanded, startups have introduced competing products aimed at enabling more researchers to study single-cell biology.
One such startup is Fluent, whose kit uses barcoded template particles to separate cell mixtures into compartments that can then be processed for single-cell applications.
Roche Genentech scientists found that when averaging upfront costs and expected outcomes, Fluent's products were more cost-effective than alternatives such as 10x, BD, and others. However, The data was published The June preprint paper also stated that “there was a large variability in cell recovery rates, and low-quality cells and surrounding RNA could not be excluded, which may affect performance evaluation.”
The study investigated the fourth version of Fluent's technology. Introducing version 5 The announcement was made in May. Illumina said Fluent's latest product “can detect cell types that are often missed by current methods” and is “highly scalable.” The company plans to integrate Fluent's latest release into its own product portfolio and to “develop a complete end-to-end solution for single-cell analysis” based on the technology.
Similar to what happened on a larger scale when Illumina acquired Grail, the Fluent deal gives the sequencing company control over a technology that competes with some of its customers' products. Illumina has said it is committed to maintaining an open sequencing platform and supporting its existing single-cell partners.
“Our initial view is that Fluent can offer cheaper, easier-to-use sample prep for NGS users that are not core single-cell user labs, but if Fluent can improve its offering (and/or offer it at a lower price that makes economic sense), it will ultimately aim to penetrate more core single-cell labs,” TD Cowen analysts said in a note on the deal.
Illumina completed the acquisition on Tuesday. Neither company disclosed the size of the deal. Cowen analysts said Fluent's “The company's overall customer base has not been disclosed, and the technology is still in the early stages of adoption, so its revenue base is likely less than $10 million.
