Singular Genomics FY23 and details of their G4X Spatial Sequencer
As well as the prospects for acquisition
Singular Genomics ($OMIC) presented FY23 results and there weren’t any big surprises. They only have shipped 24 G4 instruments, and they aren’t expecting many more G4 shipments, but instead, switch to shipping G4X instruments from now on.
According to the details in the FY23 conference call, they have a good cash runway that can last them until mid/end 2026.
Another announcement from the earnings call is that they are reducing their workforce by 20%, which is a number in line with what we have seen in other biotech companies, of the size or even bigger than OMIC, in the last 2-3 years.
Details of the G4X Spatial Sequencer product
By far the most exciting step forward for OMIC as of late is the announcement, during AGBT, of their multi-omics G4X product line.
The G4X is a second iteration of their line of products: while the G4 instrument was only an NGS machine, the G4X is the first truly NGSX (NGS + multi-omics) product that has been announced in the field.
The company has recently released a poster with details of what this new product can offer.
The first clever part to realise is that the flowcells are the slides for Spatial Biology: we had seen this before, were BGI Stereo-Seq was using the same patterned flowcell for NGS as they do for their Spatial-omics product. But this is the first time we see it in detail for what seems like it’s going to be a trend in the field.
The workflow is not too dissimilar to what people are accustomed to with 10X Genomics Xenium, or Visium, or Curio Bio SEEKER. Cut your biopsy to the size of what will go into each patch in the flowcell, apply pressure and heat, cover with a glass slide.
They have two size tissue samples, the 4mm and the 10mm size, which means you can either have 10x10 or 4x40 in a slide.
The next step is to detect either RNA or Proteins. These happen via affinity or hybridization of antibodies/probes, very similar to other examples we have seen here.
I’ll comment on the use of padlock probes later on, past the paywall line.
How does the data look? Pretty nice!
They show the variety of methods and plexes that can be achieved. Some are simple 3x protein plex (3 antibodies), some are higher plex either for RNA (105-Plex or 153-Plex) or protein (10-Plex protein).
Furthermore, OMIC can also do actual sequencing on the slides, which I still find mind blowing. I’ll comment on the difference between rolling circle amplification and Illumina’s SBS later on.
They show how they sequence 30 bases of the targetted CDR3 segments of IGH and IGL in a B-cell line, which should be enough to identify the specific CDR3s in certain cell populations in case/control studies of biopsies.
If your biopsies have 250k cells, and you assay several hundred RNAs/Proteins, that’s a pretty big matrix of numbers, and you can use them for clustering. e.g. for a tonsil section.
They also show how concordant the readouts are for a given cell type.
So with this product, would one be able to do the kind of science that you would with a 10X Genomics Xenium, but also be able to do in situ sequencing of certain short-read regions of the genome or transcriptome? It sound like the answer is ‘yes’.
I’ll go into strategic positioning now based on what we know so far.