Feb 17, 2023 | Andrew P. Han
NEW YORK – Curio Bioscience emerged from stealth earlier this month with the launch of its Seeker platform, an “industrial grade” version of Slide-seq, a whole-transcriptome spatial genomics method developed by Fei Chen’s lab at the Broad Institute.
The Palo Alto, California-based startup is ready to roll out the technology to customers now, having already completed an early-access program.
“No other technique provides the depth and breadth of information on cellular neighborhoods that Curio Seeker can,” said Cofounder and CTO Christina Fan.
The method offers resolution of 10 micrometers, making it effectively single-cell, and is based on sequencing rather than imaging. Aside from proprietary “tiles” — essentially glass slides with a layer of barcoded beads, the workflow does not require any special hardware and can be completed in eight hours, with about 2.5 hours of hands-on time, Fan said.
Curio’s products allow researchers access to spatial methods without a large upfront investment, Anoja Perera, director of sequencing and discovery genomics at the Stowers Institute told GenomeWeb. Her core lab was an early-access customer and had been using Slide-seq before that. “As long as your institute has a histologist and a sequencer, you can perform this application,” she said.
Moreover, Curio has made several improvements to the original method. Perera’s lab has already run them side by side. “We’re getting much better resolution, as far as the data goes,” Perera said, “and getting at least two times the number of genes per cell we used to get with Slide-seq.”
