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Spatial Genomics Services Market Growing as Boutique Providers Add Capabilities

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NEW YORK – In the back room of the back building of an Irvine, California, office park sit two NanoString CosMx Spatial Molecular Imagers, named "Sleepy" and "Dopey."

Though named for Snow White's dwarves, they're becoming huge for the research services offered at Dxome CLIA Laboratory, a subsidiary of South Korea-based sequencing panel maker Dxome. In just about a year, the instruments have helped the company build up a new business that VP of Sales and Marketing Adam Abdool sees getting even bigger. Though he declined to disclose revenues, spatial biology accounts for approximately 95 percent of research service revenues for the US offshoot, with the rest coming from next-generation sequencing.

"We're going to need two more in the next few months," he said. "We're fielding new requests daily."

Dxome is just one of several commercial service providers that are embracing spatial transcriptomics technologies. Some, like New York-based Singulomics and Carlsbad, California-based 3D Genomics, have experience with single-cell sequencing, especially from 10x Genomics, and have adopted that company's Visium spatial platform. Others, like Dxome and AcelaBio, are coming to spatial genomics from other areas of expertise: clinical genetic testing and histopathology, respectively.

"We're excited, like a lot of folks, both by spatial [biology's] market opportunity and the information that it brings," Abdool said. "We want to be there building the market, working with researchers on providing this data."

These boutique commercial service providers join spatial academic core labs in providing researchers with a way to get access to what some consider to be the hottest data type in genomics without the attendant risks of bringing the technology in-house, such as difficult workflows and legal threats to platform access.

Abdool said users of spatial transcriptomics platforms are shifting from what he called "innovators" — who may have worked directly with the companies developing such technologies — to "early adopters," who are interested and see the potential value but are not necessarily experts themselves. "There's lots of risk; it's very expensive," he said. As a result, researchers are turning to service providers like Dxome.

Singulomics has offered spatial services for 10x's Visium spatial gene expression platform for nearly three years, CEO and Cofounder Joyce Peng said. "It's just the natural expansion as we grow." The firm launched in 2017 as a spinout from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, offering single-cell DNA sequencing sample preparation. The firm also offers single-cell sequencing services, as well as bulk RNA-seq and targeted sequencing.

Similarly, 3D Genomics offers Visium gene expression services, as well as single-cell or single-nuclei RNA-sequencing, among other assays.

Given the wide-ranging interest in spatial biology, customers come from all over and in all stripes. Peng said Singulomics gets samples from US and international customers from pharma, academia, and biotech.

"It was rather slow at the beginning," Abdool said. "But we're seeing very significant growth and interest over the last year." The company has "tens of customers," mostly academic researchers from both coasts, but is seeing increased interest from biotech, he added.

Project pricing is based on the cost to run the assays plus costs for instrument utilization. "If you run four slides, versus two, it's lower" per slide, he said, but $10,000 is about the minimum needed to engage the firm's services using NanoString's 1,000-target panels, which cost less than the newer Human 6K Discovery Panel. "Even with that higher price, a lot of researchers are doing [the 6K panel] for discovery work," he said.

"The cost of a spatial project can vary based on factors such as a customer's scientific question, Visium technology, inclusion of pathology annotations, and level of bioinformatic support," Wendy Teft, head of AcelaBio, said in an email. The firm runs both Visium and Visium HD, including the CytAssist tissue preparation platform, and is a 10x-certified service provider. It primarily offers its services to pharma and biotech customers. "As each spatial project is unique, we start with a project scoping meeting to understand the customer’s research goals, which enables us to prepare a budget that meets the project requirements," she said.

Specific expertise is a big draw for customers to use Singulomics as their provider, Peng said. "We have proprietary protocols covering a wide range of tissue types and biopsies and different species — human, animals, insects, and amphibians," she said. "Sometimes people send us more challenging samples, and we can do them well."

"We're so focused on [NanoString's] CosMx," Abdool said, who previously worked at NanoString. "Having customers know we can do this well is a differentiator." He credited lab scientist Dahae Lee — whose full-time job is running the CosMx instruments — as a large part of the firm's success. Lee said that attention to detail, especially knowing which parts of a protocol required the most concentration, helps her get pictures that make it "worth the two-day workflow."

Both Dxome and Singulomics said they're looking at adding other spatial platforms but declined to say which ones.

Including bioinformatics help in the service package also appears to be key for many providers. About half of Dxome's customers do not have access to in-house spatial bioinformatics expertise, Abdool noted.

Even though a glass wall is all that separates Sleepy and Dopey from Dxome's CLIA- and CAP-accredited clinical laboratory, the company is not banking on spatial-based diagnostic tests anytime soon, focusing on discovery research services for now. "We're years away" from spatial transcriptomics-based diagnostics, Abdool said.