Scientists reach for new scalable technologies to capture whole transcriptomes within single cells.
Researchers increasingly turn to single-cell sequencing to answer a range of biological questions, with published single-cell data increasing year over year. As its popularity rises, so does the need for technologies that advance scalable single-cell studies. In February 2025, Parse Biosciences launched the Evercode™ WT Penta and Penta 384, a whole transcriptome single-cell analysis platform that enables researchers to profile five million cells and 384 samples in a single run.
“A few years ago, it would be pretty typical to analyze tens of thousands of cells. Now, folks are looking at many millions of cells for a lot of studies. The question becomes, how do you scale with that? That has really been the whole drive for launching the WT Penta,” said Charlie Roco, Parse Bioscience cofounder and chief technology officer.
Evercode™ WT Penta allows scientists to sequence five million cells and 384 samples in a single run, facilitating unbiased discovery of novel gene expression profiles and previously uncharacterized cell types.
Parse Biosciences
Evercode WT Penta uses split-pool combinatorial barcoding, which applies a unique label to each individual cell over a series of compartmentalization rounds using 96-well or 384-well plates, enabling unbiased expression profiling at an unprecedented scale. “A nice analogy to this is the lottery, where someone draws a raffle of balls numbered from one to 99, and it is a combination of five different numbers that makes your number unique,” explained Roco. “It is, in principle, actually very similar to how the technology works, where it is essentially assigning a number within the 96-well plates for every individual cell, and through the combination of these numbers, every cell gets a unique label.”
The Penta can help researchers identify rare cell types, scale up drug screens, and add more distinct samples to their projects. “I think it is really the best of many worlds, where you are scaling, but you are not massively scaling the amount of time for people who need to run the experiments,” said Johnny Yu, cofounder and chief scientific officer of Tahoe Therapeutics, who was among the first customers to use the Penta upon its release. “It has really enabled everything that we are doing on the oncology drug discovery side. It allows us to focus on our main business need, which is generating more data in the service of finding better cancer treatments.”
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