Up & Comers
Illumina
Illumina may be the longtime leader in next-generation sequencing, but it isn’t quite as established in the spatial field. That’s something the company expects to address next year, when it plans to commercially release a spatial transcriptomics technology it unveiled in February at the 2025 Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) General Meeting. Compatible with Illumina’s NextSeq and NovaSeq sequenc- ers and using a new multimodal analysis platform, the company’s spatial technology is designed to let researchers examine the spatial proximity of millions of cells per experiment, using what Illumina says is a capture area nine times larger and with four times greater resolution than current technologies. At AGBT, Illumina highlighted researchers from the Broad Institute, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and TGen who shared data on their use of Illumina’s spatial technology.
Kanvas Biosciences
Kanvas Biosciences said in August that it is opening a new Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) lab in South San Francisco, CA, to accelerate its capabilities for man- ufacturing live biotherapeutic products. The lab—which will meet clinical-grade production standards—is intended to allow Kanvas to seamlessly transition from R&D and process development into GMP manufacturing to support Phase I and II clinical trials of its lead pipeline candidate KAN-001, a preclinical drug that targets checkpoint refractory cancers. On March 31, Kanvas researchers posted a preprint to bioRxiv detailing the company’s High-Phylogenetic-Resolution Spatial Mapping (HiPR-Map) spectral imaging platform, designed to enable precise enumeration and spatial localization of microbial cells within complex communities.
MGI Tech and Complete Genomics
MGI Tech joined Seoul-based JCBio in August to launch the DCS Lab Project, designed to accelerate multiomics innovation in South Korea. Launched in 2023 to serve international labs, DCS stands for MGI’s three core technologies—DNA genomics, cell omics, and spatial omics. MGI’s U.S. subsidiary, Complete Genom- ics, in March began offering STOmics spatial transcriptomics products to mem- bers of the Human Cell Atlas. Also in March, Complete Genomics partnered with BioTuring to offer researchers access to SpatialX, a deep-learning tool for unified multi-technology spatial data analysis compatible with STOmics chemistries. In February at the 2025 Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) Gen- eral Meeting, MGI and Complete Genomics unveiled the DNBSEQ-T1+ next-gen- eration mid-throughput sequencer, designed to offer speed and flexibility for spatial and other genomic applications.
Ochre Bio
Ochre Bio has completed a sublease for 5,894 square feet of lab and office space on the sixth floor of 430 East 29th Street, the West Tower within the Alexandria Center® for Life Science—New York City, developed and owned by Alexandria Real Estate Equities. The space will house what Ochre said was the largest ex vivo machine perfusion lab- oratory of human donor livers in the world, late-stage validation facilities where the company’s novel RNA therapies will be validated before entering clinical trials. Com- mercial real estate firm JLL announced the sublease in July. Ochre relocated within Manhattan from BioLabs at NYU Langone, 180 Varick Street. In June, Ochre made a list of “25 European Startups to Watch” published by Bloomberg and Founders Forum.
Pixelgen Technologies
Pixelgen Technologies in June was awarded grant and equity financing of €12.5 million (about $14.7 million) from the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelera- tor, a funding initiative under the European Union’s Horizon Europe program that is designed to support “highly” innovative startups with disruptive technologies. Stockholm-based Pixelgen said it will use the financing to expand the applications of its Pixelgen Proxiome Kit, launched earlier this year as the first kit and software for protein interactome analysis of single cells at high capacity. The kit is based on Pixelgen’s Proximity Network Assay, which is designed to deliver nanoscale spatial analysis of immune cell proteins at scale. Unveiled in February, the Proximity Net- work Assay was detailed in a preprint posted June 24 to bioRxiv.
Single Technologies
As with Pixelgen, Single Technologies also won €12.5 million (about $14.7 mil- lion) in July from the EIC Accelerator. Single said its funding consisted of a €2.5 million ($2.9 million) non-dilutive grant and a €10 million (about $11.7 million) direct equity investment from the EIC Fund, Europe’s largest investor in deep tech startups. Stockholm-based Single Technologies is developing Theta™, a 3D spatial sequencing platform that reads biological information directly in tissue and cells, in three dimensions, with molecular precision. The platform is also designed to make whole genome sequencing available for as little as $10 per genome.
Syncell
Syncell in August announced a strategic co-marketing agreement with Thermo Fisher Scientific to bring a fully integrated, high-resolution spatial proteomics workflow to market. The companies aim to integrate Syncell’s Microscoop® tech- nology for spatial protein purification with Thermo Fisher’s Orbitrap™ Astral™ and Orbitrap™ Astral™ Zoom mass spectrometers, the latter launched in June. Syncell was founded in 2020 to commercialize technology developed by founder and CEO Jung-Chi Liao at the Academia Sinica laboratory in Taiwan. The Taipei-based company has U.S. sites in Watertown, MA, and Livermore, CA. To date, Syncell has raised $30 million from investors. In March, Syncell was named one of Fast Com- pany’s Most Innovative Companies of 2025.
Takara Bio USA (includes Curio Bioscience)
Takara Bio expanded into spatial biology this year by acquiring Curio Bioscience, which was among the Up & Comers spotlighted on last year’s edition of this A-List. The first company to launch a commercial single-cell RNA-seq technology in 2011, Takara Bio now offers two spatial biology technologies, Seeker and Trek- ker, each designed to bring spatial insights seamlessly into single-cell research. Seeker is designed for researchers seeking unbiased, whole-transcriptome discovery at near single-cell resolution without being locked into proprietary systems. Trekker extends Seeker by adding the ability to tag and track individual nuclei within the tissue context. It integrates upstream of leading single-cell mul- tiomic workflows, adding spatial context to single-cell datasets. Takara Bio USA has identified three applications for its spatial biology products: cancer biology and the tumor microenvironment, development biology, and neuroscience.
Zeiss Group (ZEISS Research Microscopy Solutions)
ZEISS Group in April launched its ZEISS Axioscan 7 spatial biology slide scanner, the central component of an analytical workflow solution portfolio focused on spatial biology applications in clinical research environments. A month later, ZEISS launched a partnership with 3D spatial biology company Alpenglow to jointly develop an inverted light-sheet microscope and bioinformatics pipeline tailored for clinical applications. Privately held ZEISS includes spatial biology activity within its ZEISS Research Microscopy Solutions strategic business unit, part of the ZEISS Industrial Quality & Research business segment, which saw its revenue dip one percent in the first half of the company’s fiscal year, to €1.168 billion ($1.362 billion) from €1.177 billion ($1.372 billion).
