Vizgen Releases Commercial MERSCOPE Platform
Vizgen, the life science company dedicated to improving human health by visualizing single-cell spatial genomics information, today announced shipment of the first commercial MERSCOPETM Platforms, marking the successful start of their limited summer release program. These first platforms are being purchased by leading research institutes including the Salk Institute, the University of California, Irvine, and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Vizgen will continue shipping a limited number of commercial instruments for the next several months before releasing MERSCOPE to the U.S. market at large in late 2021.
MERSCOPE is the first commercially available high-plex single-cell spatial genomics platform, and the only platform for MERFISH technology. Developed in the laboratory of Dr. Xiaowei Zhuang, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and David B. Arnold, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, MERFISH provides the highest detection efficiency available for spatially profiling gene expression across whole tissues and resolving individual transcripts with nanometer-scale resolution through combinatorial labeling, sequential imaging, and error-robust barcoding.
“This is a revolutionary time for the field of genomics. Researchers across the country are now able to access the spatial dimension to answer new kinds of scientific questions and make significant biological discoveries,” said Terry Lo, President and CEO of Vizgen. “Profiling the expression of hundreds of genes, in hundreds of thousands of cells, for hundreds of millions of transcripts all while retaining the spatial information within the tissue architecture has never been done before. What was previously unimaginable, MERSCOPE now makes routine.”
About Vizgen
Vizgen is dedicated to pioneering the next generation of genomics, providing tools that demonstrate the possibilities of in situ single cell spatial genomics, setting the standard for the spatial genomics field. These tools are enabling researchers to gain new insight into the biological systems that govern human health and disease with spatial context. The company's MERSCOPETM platform enables massively multiplexed, genome-scale nucleic acid imaging with high accuracy and unrivaled detection efficiency at subcellular resolution. MERSCOPE provides transformative insight into a wide range of tissue-scale basic research and translational medicine in oncology, immunology, neuroscience, infectious disease, developmental biology, cell and gene therapy, and is an essential tool for accelerating drug discovery and development.