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France's Scipio Inks European Distribution Deals for Single-Cell RNA-seq Kits

NEW YORK – French single-cell sequencing firm Scipio said on Tuesday that it has signed four deals to distribute its single-cell RNA-sequencing kit in six European countries.

Paris-based Scipio has partnered with Thistle Scientific in the UK and Ireland, Ozyme in France, BioCat in Austria and Germany, and Witec in Switzerland. The announcement came as the company launched its kit and analysis software worldwide.

"We are achieving our goal of bringing a single-cell solution to every lab," Scipio CEO and Cofounder Pierre Walrafen said in a statement. "With the Asteria kit ready in the freezer for on-the-spot profiling and cloud-based Cytonaut accessible from any computer for immediate bioinformatic analysis, anyone can start generating high-quality single-cell data on their own terms."

The firm has raised at least €7.2 million ($7.6 million) in financing since 2017, including a Series A round in 2020 led by M Ventures, the venture capital arm of Merck KGaA. It has also received support from the Région Île-de-France and the Programme d’Investissement d'Avenir, operated by BPI France.

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