A Uniquely Scalable Approach to Sequence Tens of Millions of Single Cells Without Compromising Performance

Immunotherapies (including CAR-T cell therapies) are wonder drugs when they work, but the response rates of today’s immunotherapies are only 15-20% and therapy costs remain prohibitively high for mass adoption. Recent advances in single cell sequencing make it a critical tool for the development of next generation cell therapies through high impact applications such as TCR immune profiling and pooled CRISPR screening. Unlocking the value of these applications requires interrogation of rt10 million cells per experiment. Expiration of Illumina’s core IP in 2023 re-ignited competition in US and EU markets and re-accelerated the drop in DNA sequencing costs to make sequencing of ~10 million cells affordable in 1-2 years, but existing methods for single cell barcoding do not support throughput beyond 1 million cells per experiment. Proposed alternatives are scalable, but trade-offs in performance and ease-of-use make them unsuitable for translational research. Sansimeon’s approach uniquely enables scaled single cell sequencing with throughput to 100M cells, while retaining high ease-of-use and necessary cell capture efficiency for high-throughput applications in translational research. The platform overcomes throughput limitations common to other drop-seq approaches by leveraging rapid deterministic pairing of single cells with single beads in a microchannel prior to emulsification, without the need for multi-step labeling workflows such as cell-hashing or combinatorial indexing.