CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--ReadCoor, Inc., a company reinventing omics and pathology with its panomic spatial sequencing platform, today announced a grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) and DAF, an advised fund of Silicon Valley Community Foundation, to spatially map cortical cells using Fluorescent in situ Sequencing (FISSEQ) for the Human Cell Atlas.
The collaboration’s goal is to benchmark in situ technologies and establish best practices for the Human Cell Atlas. The atlas will contain in depth variance maps of cell transcriptomes, genomes, proteomes, metabolomes, and epigenetic landscapes. FISSEQ will provide deep insight into cell variation in the context of the tissue microenvironment, a feature that is difficult or impossible to obtain with traditional in situ methods. FISSEQ also uniquely delivers researchers an opportunity to locate genes that have mutated away from the original sequence due to its ability to produce reads without known gene targets. Most standard in situ methods are blind to such changes and can miss altered genes.
The research project is part of an Allen Institute-led consortium of world-class research institutions. Members include the Allen Institute for Brain Science (Ed Lein and Hongkui Zeng), Broad Institute (Aviv Regev, Evan Macosko and Fei Chen), California Institute of Technology (Long Cai and Barbara Wold), Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (Anthony Zador), Harvard University (George Church, Paola Arlotta and Xiaowei Zhuang), Karolinska Institute (Sten Linnarsson), KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Joakim Lundeberg), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ed Boyden), Stockholm University (Mats Nilsson), and the University of California, San Diego (Kun Zhang). The ReadCoor team is led by Samuel A. Inverso.
“Our team is honored to be part of this consortium of world-leading academic scientists to contribute to the Human Cell Atlas,” said Shawn Marcell, Chief Executive Officer of ReadCoor. “We look forward to working with our fellow collaborators to deliver a robust map of cortical cells and transcend our foundational understanding of health and disease.”
About Fluorescent in situ Sequencing (FISSEQ)
FISSEQ is a spatial sequencing technology that reads and visualizes the three-dimensional coordinates of molecules of intact tissue, a capability that stands to revolutionize panomics and pathology. FISSEQ was developed in the Church Lab at Harvard University and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and first published in Science in 2014 (Highly multiplexed three-dimensional subcellular transcriptome sequencing in situ). The platform has broad application in the areas of drug development, diagnostics, and machine learning.
About ReadCoor, Inc.
ReadCoor is leading the next generation of omics by delivering the first panomic spatial sequencing platform to the global audience of researchers, clinicians, pharma and diagnostics companies, and ultimately patients. It is accomplishing this with Fluorescent in situ Sequencing (FISSEQ), a fundamental new technology, which simultaneously integrates high-throughput sequencing, and three-dimensional morphometric analysis. This uniquely powerful platform is expected to revolutionize the next phase in understanding the panomic landscape and introduce vast new opportunities for important and meaningful clinical insight.
About the Allen Institute for Brain Science
The Allen Institute for Brain Science is a division of the Allen Institute (alleninstitute.org), an independent, 501(c)(3) nonprofit medical research organization, and is dedicated to accelerating the understanding of how the human brain works in health and disease. Using a big science approach, the Allen Institute generates useful public resources used by researchers and organizations around the globe, drives technological and analytical advances, and discovers fundamental brain properties through integration of experiments, modeling and theory. Launched in 2003 with a seed contribution from founder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen, the Allen Institute is supported by a diversity of government, foundation and private funds to enable its projects. The Allen Institute for Brain Science’s data and tools are publicly available online at brain-map.org.
About the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was launched in December 2015 by Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician and founder and CEO of The Primary School in East Palo Alto. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is a new kind of philanthropic organization dedicated to advancing human potential and promoting equal opportunity through world class engineering, grantmaking, impact investing, policy, and advocacy work. Initial areas of focus include supporting science through basic biomedical research and education through personalized learning. CZI is also exploring ways to build stronger, more equitable communities through affordable housing and criminal justice reform.
