Curio Bioscience Launches New Curio Seeker 10x10 Kit to Enable the Simultaneous Capture of Nearly One Million Spatial Transcriptomes

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Curio Bioscience today announced an expansion of its Curio Seeker product line with a larger format to deliver a more complete view of large biological structures, including human tissue samples, providing one hundred times more data compared to other whole transcriptome spatial analysis solutions.

“The new Curio Seeker 10x10 spatial mapping kit enables spatial transcriptomic analysis of tissue up to one square centimeter. This larger format will facilitate studies with human tissue samples and whole-organ samples from model organisms, all in an easy-to-use workflow and industry-leading spatial resolution,” said Christina Fan, PhD, Co-founder and CTO of Curio Bioscience. “Together with the 3x3 spatial mapping kit launched earlier this year, the expanded Curio Seeker product line will help accelerate scientific discovery and advance basic research by lowering the barrier of entry to complex spatial analyses while providing high quality data.”

Curio Seeker is a whole transcriptome analysis reagent kit solution that provides the ability to generate molecular images of tissue sections by capturing and mapping the spatial location of RNA molecules using next-generation sequencers. The spatial transcriptomic data generated by Curio Seeker enable researchers to better understand cellular functions in the context of their native environment, providing additional biological insight that are not available from single-cell RNA sequencing approaches.

Among the company’s rapidly growing list of early adopters is Cornell University where researchers are using the Curio Seeker 10x10 kit to access high-resolution transcriptomics information in their organisms of interest. Professor Iwijn De Vlaminck’s lab has applied spatially resolved transcriptomics with the Curio Seeker kit to study the pathogenesis of viral myocarditis and viral encephalitis, the development of the chicken heart, and the cellular and molecular processes associated with ovulation.

“High-resolution, spatially resolved RNA sequencing is a new and powerful approach to map and study biology. A highly useful tool to unlock the real potential of this new approach is the new Curio Seeker 10x10 kit, which allows us to use our existing sequencer to generate more unbiased, high-resolution spatial transcriptomics data across larger tissue sections than we could have achieved any other way,” said Iwijn De Vlaminck, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Cornell University. “We are extremely excited about the data being generated from the Curio Seeker kit, and we are already gaining compelling new insights into the spatial relationships between cells and cell neighborhoods in our model system.”

The Curio Seeker kit provides a reliable baseline for understanding developmental biology, assessing the immunological response to cancer, and discovering molecular signatures that predict disease progression or treatment response among other studies. The new 10x10 kit joins the Curio Seeker 3x3 kit, which was the first in a suite of products designed to accelerate high-resolution spatial discovery using existing sequencing instrumentation. With industry-leading cellular scale resolution, the new kit enables scientists to get the most transcriptomic data from their samples. It is compatible with all Illumina sequencers, allowing for plug-and-play use of the kit in existing sequencing workflows without requiring any additional equipment.

Curio Bioscience leveraged the Slide-seq technique that its academic co-founders developed at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The academic co-founders are Evan Macosko, MD, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital; Fei Chen, PhD, assistant professor at Harvard University’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology; and Samuel Rodriques, PhD, group leader at the Francis Crick Institute.

“The number of data points that Curio Seeker 10x10 kit delivers is significantly greater than what was generated with the original Slide-seq technique. It brings high resolution, whole transcriptome, spatial biology further into the scale of human biology, expanding a researcher’s ability to see larger regions of interest in a tissue sample,” said Fei Chen. “Curio Bioscience has taken an innovation and successfully scaled it with a commercial-grade solution that is simple to use and offers significantly better sensitivity. This evolution of our foundational technology will certainly help accelerate the impact of spatial transcriptomics in the scientific community.”

For more information about the Curio Seeker family of kits, click here.

About Curio Bioscience

Curio Bioscience is advancing a new generation of high-precision tools for the life sciences industry. The company has developed innovative spatial biology capabilities to map the whole transcriptome at high resolution using existing sequencing workflows and instrumentation. The founding team has a strong track record of bringing genomic solutions to market. Based in Palo Alto, California, Curio Bioscience is a privately held company. For more information, visit www.curiobioscience.com.

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