This story has been updated to reflect that the BioLegend-VIB partnership will focus on deployment rather than development of a single-cell technology.
NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Antibody provider BioLegend announced today a partnership with the Belgian life science research institute VIB to deploy a single-cell multi-omics technology.
Under the partnership, the parties will test and implement BioLegend's TotalSeq antibodies as part of a workflow combing single-cell proteomics with single-cell transcriptomics.
According to VIB researchers Martin Guilliams and Charlotte Scott, the goal is to use the TotalSeq antibodies for surface protein profiling, allowing scientists to measure the expression of hundreds of surface proteins in parallel with single-cell RNA-sequencing.
The method is expected to have applications within a variety of research areas including cancer, where it will allow deeper characterization of tumors and the tumor microenvironments, and neurology where it will improve single-cell research identifying and characterizing single cells involved in normal and diseased brain function.
“We believe that single-cell protein profiling can revolutionize the single-cell field and we want to boost the uptake of this technology at VIB," Silvie Van den Hoecke, life science technology specialist at VIB, said in a statement. "For this, we are pleased to be closely collaborating with BioLegend on their TotalSeq antibody libraries."
The agreement follows several other recent deals announced by BioLegend around single-cell analysis. In July the firm partnered with 10X Genomics on a single-cell gene and protein expression technology. In January it announced it had licensed the New York Genome Center's CITE-seq single cell analysis technology.