On April 18, 10x Genomics revealed Atera, a spatial biology instrument that it had kept hidden for months.
Rather than launch it in February at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) meeting, long the primary showcase for new omics tech, 10x chose to introduce it to a room full of cancer researchers, at the AACR annual meeting held this past week.
I wrote a story about the launch which underscores one of the points Serge made in our conversation, recorded Monday. Many researchers are struggling to get larger studies of tissue samples off the ground because they have to choose several hundred genes out of the 15,000 or so transcripts a given cell might express. As Nick Banovich, who runs a spatial core lab at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (T-Gen), said:
“[Choosing gene panels is] the biggest hurdle to projects today.”
Now, with Atera offering the ability to do 18,000 genes at high resolution, they simply won’t have to make that choice.
It’s not a shock that Saxonov would say Bruker’s CosMx, which already offers the whole transcriptome at single-cell resolution, offers little in the way of competition. Even if that’s true, the market will provide the answer. What was shocking was to hear him compare Atera to another high-throughput instrument that got a similar stage launch at a San Diego hotel just a few years ago. To find out what it is, you’ll have to listen all the way to the end!
Thanks for listening and if there are still questions you have about Atera, please let me know!
The podcast is also available on Apple and Spotify:
https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1895321918
