Newsletter: April 28, 2026
Since I spoke to 10x about Atera: Guardant lost its CMO, Q1 earnings rolled in, and I recorded this week’s podcast with AI virtual cell pioneer Christina Theodoris.
Last week I launched Ion Genomics with an interview with 10x Genomics CEO Serge Saxonov.
First episode! With 10x Genomics CEO Serge Saxonov
On April 18, 10x Genomics revealed Atera, a spatial biology instrument that it had kept hidden for months.
We spoke at the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting, where 10x introduced Atera: a higher-throughput spatial biology instrument that captures whole-transcriptome data at single-cell resolution in both fresh and fixed tissue.
He claimed the Atera launch was “a much bigger deal” than the launch of Illumina’s workhorse NovaSeq X sequencer several years ago.
“The closest analogy in our space was the takeoff of NGS in the first place,” Saxonov said. “So you have to go back further into maybe the first systems, whether it's the [Illumina Genome Analyzer or the HiSeq], because it is a new category of a system that didn't really exist before.”
On Friday, Tempus AI announced a partnership with the University of Southern California and Keck Medicine. The deal brings Tempus’ molecular diagnostics and genomic profiling to Keck’s clinical workflows and gives USC access to Tempus’ TIME Trial program for patient-trial matching. The partners will also collaborate on translational research and co-develop diagnostics, therapies and digital tools.
Elsewhere, first-quarter earnings rolled in from BGI Genomics, MGI Tech and Qiagen.
Guardant Health disclosed that it will be looking for a new CMO now that Craig Eagle is leaving in two weeks. In five years at the company, he oversaw several key clinical trials for blood-based colorectal cancer testing, including ECLIPSE and COSMOS.
Eyes on the week ahead:
I’ll be interviewing MIT researchers about FINGERS-7B, their new AI model for Alzheimer’s disease. The foundation model, trained on thousands of patients with pre-clinical Alzheimer’s, has identified multiomic biomarkers that could predict disease trajectories before symptoms of memory loss appear.
Finally, this week’s podcast features Christina Theodoris, a researcher at the Gladstone Institutes using AI to study cardiovascular disease. Her latest model, MaxToki, predicts how aging affects gene expression across different cell types. We also discussed her favorite painters, AI slop, and whether (or not) she likes the Ion Genomics logos.
See you Friday!
Andy