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Cellular Research, Inc., is a biotechnology research and development company that has a mission to change life science research through high-resolution investigation of single cells and limited samples. Cellular Research was founded in 2011 by Stephen P. A. Fodor, Ari Chaney, and Stephen Quake, who came from Silicon Valley and Stanford University respectively. The company also has an active partnership program with pharmaceutical and diagnostics companies for advancing clinical applications.
Launched in 2014, Cellular Research launched their Precise assays, which are targeted RNASeq assays. At the same time, the company announced the availability of application-focused panels for the Precise assays, including panels for oncology, induced pluripotent stem cells, and immunology. These assays use next generation sequencing in conjunction with Cellular Research's molecular indexing technology to create an alternative to quantitative PCR.
The Precise assays combine molecular and sample indexing in 96 and 384 sample formats. This is intended to allow users to sequence up to 4,608 samples in a single sequencing run. The system is designed to allow users to perform these sequences without need for new equipment or training, yet with the accuracy and sensitivity necessary for low expression targets in rare or low quantity samples.
The Pixel System, developed by Cellular Research, is a standalone detection platform for direct mRNA quantitation from single cells and rare samples, utilizing Molecular Indexing in a simple and fast format. Cellular Research announced the Pixel System in 2014, which was based on the company's previous Molecular Indexing technology, and enabled researchers to examine absolute levels of gene expression in individual cells in a non-destructive assay without PCR bias and with single molecule precision.
Developed by Cellular Research to address the limitations of RNA-Seq for targeted gene expression experiments, the Molecular Indexing technology eliminated amplification bias and enables direct quantification of molecules by tagging individual copies of DNA molecules with barcodes or molecular indices. Once the DNA sample is encoded, the Molecular Indexing platform can amplify the sample as desired while giving researchers a chance to track and distinguish the original template from clonal replicates, to allow for absolute quantification and sequencing error correction. This is, in turn, to help reduce the problem of amplification bias. The Molecular Indexing technology underpins the company's Precise and Pixel assay technologies.
Visual description of Cellular Research's Molecular Indexing system.
Developed by Cellular Research, Resolve is a genetic cytometry for massively parallel single-cell sequencing. The platform is intended to measure the expression profile of large numbers of genes in thousands of single cells with high sensitivity and digital precision. This technology is intended to solve problems associated with next-generation sequencing, microarrays, or quantitative PCR to measure genes from a sample, without being designed to examine individual cells. The Resolve platform is intended to solve this problem, offering the same measuring capabilities of sequencing, microarrays, and quantitative PCR, while also offering an examination of genes across thousands of single cells per sample, and intended to scale to tens or hundreds of thousands of cells.
In 2015, Becton Dickinson, and specifically BD Life Sciences, a segment of the company, announced the acquisition of Cellular Research. The acquisition is intended to provide researchers with a integrated sample prep workflow to quantify and study gene expression in large numbers of cells and to help enable higher resolution biology. This workflow is intended to help researchers make new discoveries in single cell analysis to help the understanding of genomic diversity of single cells. Further, the acquisition is intended to help researchers identify new approaches for targeted clinical diagnostics and therapies in fields such as immunology, immune-oncology, and personalized medicine.
