Dive Brief:
- Illumina has bought Fluent Biosciences to add single-cell analysis technology to its portfolio, the company said Tuesday.
- Fluent’s technology is designed to generate large single-cell libraries, at a relatively low cost, while removing the need for complex, expensive instrumentation and microfluidic consumables, Illumina said in the announcement.
- The kits compete with products from companies including 10x Genomics, an Illumina partner. Illumina said it will remain an open sequencing platform and will support existing partnerships.
Dive Insight:
10x helped establish single-cell RNA sequencing as a core part of the research toolkit when it introduced the Chromium instrument in 2016. The company entered into a co-marketing agreement with Illumina for linked-read sequencing the same year.
As the market has grown, startups have introduced rival products intended to allow more researchers to study single-cell biology.
Fluent is one of the startups. The company’s kits segregate cell mixtures into partitions with barcoded template particles that can be processed for single-cell applications.
Scientists at Roche’s Genentech found Fluent’s product is more cost-efficient than alternatives from 10x, BD and others, after averaging upfront costs over expected output. However, the team, which published the data in a preprint paper in June, also saw “substantial cell recovery variation ... which may impact performance assessments by failing to exclude low-quality cells and ambient RNA.”
The study looked at the fourth version of Fluent’s technology. The startup introduced version five in May. Illumina said Fluent’s latest product “can detect cell types often missed with current methods” and has “the highest scalability.” The company plans to integrate Fluent’s latest release into its product portfolio and build on the technology to “develop full end-to-end solutions for single-cell analysis.”
As happened on a larger scale when Illumina bought Grail, the Fluent deal gives the sequencing company control of technology that competes with products from some of its customers. Illumina stated that it is committed to remaining an open sequencing platform and supporting existing single-cell partners.
TD Cowen analysts said in a note on the deal that their “initial view is Fluent can offer cheaper/easier to use sample prep initially for NGS users who are not core single cell users labs and eventually will look to penetrate more core single cell labs if they can improve Fluent's offering (and/or come in with lower price that makes economic sense).”
Illumina closed the acquisition on Tuesday. Neither party disclosed the size of the takeover. The Cowen analysts wrote that Fluent’s “total customer base has not been publicly disclosed and the technology is still in early days of the adoption curve,” therefore the revenue base is likely under $10 million.
