This story has been updated to include the Cartana acquisition price.
NEW YORK – 10x Genomics announced Monday that it will acquire two firms involved in developing in situ analysis technologies: ReadCoor and Cartana.
10x has entered into a definitive agreement to buy Boston-based ReadCoor, a spinout from George Church's laboratory at Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute, for $350 million in cash and stock. ReadCoor launched its RC2 spatial multiomics platform, based on fluorescent in situ sequencing technology, in February at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conference. 10x said it expects the deal to close by the end of the month, pending ReadCoor shareholder approval. Goldman Sachs is acting as financial advisor to ReadCoor.
10x also revealed it acquired Stockholm-based Cartana, developers of in situ RNA analysis technology, in late August for $41.2 million. Other details of that transaction were not disclosed.
"Our goal has always been to anticipate the frontiers of biology and build products that accelerate science in exponential ways. We believe that in situ approaches will be essential for how biological research and clinical assays will be conducted in the future," 10x CEO and Cofounder Serge Saxonov said in a statement. "Both companies have made significant technical advances, which will serve as a powerful foundation for future product development at 10x."
ReadCoor, founded in 2016, has raised more than $50 million, including a $27 million Series B financing round in January.
Cartana is the latest technology developed at Sweden's Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab) to find its way to 10x; the Visium platform was based on technology acquired with the 2018 purchase of Spatial Transcriptomics, another SciLifeLab spinout.
The deals give 10x Genomics control of more than 110 patents combined, the firm said in a statement. These approaches, "will give scientists the ability to measure large numbers of molecules directly in tissue by capturing the precise location of those molecules at subcellular resolution," and are complementary to 10x's Chromium single-cell and Visium spatial genomics platforms, the firm said.
Church and Cartana cofounder Mats Nilsson will become scientific advisors to 10x Genomics.
In morning trading on the Nasdaq, shares of 10x Genomics were up 3 percent at $134.97.