Today, Mission Bio announced the addition of Copy Number Analysis, which extends the platform’s Copy Number Variation capabilities without any change to the current workflow.
San Francisco-based Mission Bio Inc. launched an addition to its Tapestri Platform that provides it the ability to track the full scope genomics of cancer in terms of single-cell capabilities.
Today, the company announced the addition of Copy Number Analysis, which extends the platform’s Copy Number Variation (CNV) capabilities, without any change to the current workflow. With this latest capability, Mission Bio’s Tapestri Platform now stands as the first commercial platform with insight into both mutations and CNVs from the same cell on a single platform, expanding the company’s leadership in single-cell DNA analysis, the company said this morning. CNVs, which is where portions of the chromosomes are amplified or deleted, Mission Bio said, are the source of numerous genetic disorders and are present in all types of cancers.
“When determining the clonal heterogeneity across a cancer sample, it’s important to comprehensively measure both DNA mutations and copy number alterations in every cell because disease progression and therapy response are based on differences in genetic alterations across cells. This includes both single nucleotide variations (SNVs), which are prognostic and provide insight into the disease development and progression, and CNVs, which tend to predict the severity of the disease,” Mission Bio said in its statement.
Samra Turajilic, a researcher at the Francis Crick Institute in London, said that single-cell level access to both SNVs and CNVs from the same cell will provide researchers with a higher resolution with which to “explore tumor evaluation and disease progression.” By having the access, Turajilic said being able to analyze the novel data types will help cancer researchers “better resolve the genetic and cellular heterogeneity in cancer.”
Mission Bio’s Tapestri Platform is capable of identifying cancer cell mutation profiles. The Tapestri Platform’s ability to detect rare cancer subclones and co-occurring cancer mutations using single-cell genomics provides a precise way to measure therapy response and disease progression. The platform allows researchers to identify the mutations that are driving the disease and allows them to improve treatment. With the Tapestri Platform, researchers and clinicians can now leverage a single platform to measure nearly every type of DNA change in every diseased cell, the company said.
Charlie Silver, Mission Bio’s chief executive officer, called the ability to pair mutations and gene-level to chromosome-level copy number from the same cell on a single platform a “game-changer” for single-cell DNA analysis. Silver said the capabilities will enable “unprecedented insights,” which will accelerate cancer research and enable precision medicine.
“The ability to pair mutations and gene-level to chromosome-level copy number from the same cell has never before been available for single-cell DNA analysis, let alone on a single platform,” Nigel Beard, head of research and development at Mission Bio said in a statement. “With the launch of Copy Number Analysis on the Tapestri Platform, we’re enabling the full picture of any variation at the DNA level, giving unprecedented insights that will accelerate cancer research and enable precision medicine.”
Mission Bio has demonstrated the Tapestri Platform’s ability to track and monitor cancer evolution with single-cell precision with numerous peer-reviewed studies, including the most recent in the publication Cancer Discovery, which examined Tapestri’s use in Acute Myeloid Leukemia research. Silver told BioSpace earlier this year that cancer researchers, particularly those working with blood cancers, have turned to the Tapestri platform to understand the genomic pathways.
Earlier this year, Mission Bio and LabCorp struck a partnership that will allow the North Carolina-based company to evaluate the Tapestri Platform for applications in clinical diagnostics and in the development of new companion diagnostics. In an interview with BioSpace, Silver said the partnership is a way for his company to expand its reach and allow them to provide greater service to their customers. Over the next year, Silver said he hopes to build on the key partnership with LabCorp in order to expand Mission Bio’s reach into precision medicine.
Mission Bio isn’t the only company to work in gene sequencing. Other companies are also making a mark in the field, including Illumina, 10x Genomics, QIAGEN and more.
This week, Bay Area-based 10x filed a preliminary prospectus with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a $100 million initial public offering. The filing of the prospectus came about seven months after the company, which relocated to Pleasanton, Calif. last year, secured $35 million in a Series D funding round, which brought the company’s total financing to $243 million. The company has seen strong growth following the 2018 acquisitionStockholm-based Spatial Transcriptomics, a leader in the field of spatial genomics, and Epinomics, a company that focuses on epigenetics.
California-based Agilent has also been flexing its M&A muscle to expand its diagnostics offerings. In July, the company plunked down $1.165 billion to acquire privately-owned BioTek Instruments, Inc.
Netherlands-based QIAGEN provides sample and assay technologies for molecular diagnostics, applied testing, and academic and pharmaceutical research.
