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MiRxes, BGI Research, MGI Partner on Spatial Genomics in Singapore

NEW YORK – Biotechnology company MiRxes said on Monday that it has partnered with BGI Research and MGI to develop a high-throughput, high-resolution spatial genomics pipeline in Singapore.

The three-way partnership will combine MiRxes' end-to-end RNA translational research capabilities with BGI's Stereo-Seq technology, and MGI's DNBSeq-T10 system. The resulting platform will be based at MiRxes' multiomics laboratory at Singapore's Biopolis research and development center.

Financial details of the partnership were not disclosed.

The platform is expected to facilitate collaboration between the three companies and global academic and clinical institutions, giving researchers within the region access to cutting-edge technologies.

MiRxes was spun out from Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR) in 2014, originally to develop and commercialize clinical tests for a PCR-based microRNA platform that A*STAR had developed for research applications. Last year, it raised $77 million in a Series C financing round to accelerate the commercialization of a number of early cancer detection tests.

"This is a natural and necessary extension of MiRxes' current clinical biomarker research, as we seek to understand the origin and spatial-temporal dynamics of the disease biomarkers discovered through cross-sectional population cohorts," Lihan Zhou, cofounder and CEO of MiRxes, said in a statement.

BGI recently debuted the Stereo-Seq technology and unveiled a global research initiative aiming to promote multiomics tools to propel the understanding of spatiotemporal biology, called the SpatioTemporal Omics Consortium.

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