Curio Bioscience  announced the commercialization of the world’s first technology that spatially contextualizes single-cell sequencing data, leveraging a breakthrough invention called Slide-tags developed by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and published in Nature this past December. The first stage of Curio’s commercialization of this new product, called Curio Trekker, is an early access program that already includes world-class research organizations as participants.

Using standard single-cell workflows, researchers will be able to use Curio Trekker to easily enhance single-cell and single-nuclei analyses with precise positional information at single-cell resolution, where this level of performance had previously been unavailable simultaneously.

“Curio Trekker is the world’s first product that converts single-cell genomics data into single-cell spatial data, enabling a new era of scientific discovery that is simply not possible with today’s standard single-cell sequencing workflows,” said Christina Fan, PhD, Co-founder and CTO of Curio Bioscience. “By enabling researchers to routinely and easily capture the spatial context of cell populations, Curio is putting a very accessible and powerful new tool in the hands of researchers to advance discovery research in a way that is very exciting for cancer biology, neuroscience, developmental sciences and beyond. We believe that Curio Trekker will be transformative to the single-cell market, as it delivers true single cell spatial resolution to scientists, regardless of organism or tissue type.”

The new technology was developed at the labs of the academic co-founders of Curio Bioscience: Evan Macosko, MD, PhD, a Broad Institute member in the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research and an associate professor of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital; and Fei Chen, PhD, a Broad core institute member and an assistant professor at Harvard University’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology. Curio Bioscience has signed a licensing agreement with the Broad Institute, Inc. and is commercializing the technology.

“Single-cell sequencing has been an incredibly impactful technology for profiling cell populations, but the research community has been eager to understand how cells of interest are organized spatially, so we set out to develop a method that delivers this,” said Dr. Evan Macosko. “Curio Trekker is the culmination of this work and provides the spatial context that single-cell researchers are lacking today in a readily accessible format. Curio Bioscience has made it as easy to use as simply plugging it right into existing single cell-based workflows.”

“Curio Bioscience has very rapidly developed the Broad technologies into spatial omics products used by scientists around the world performing cutting-edge research,” said Dr. Fei Chen. “We are very excited to see Curio accelerate the development of the slide-tags technology with an industrial-grade kit that will bring spatial data to the single cell genomics market.”

Early Access Program

Curio Bioscience has launched an early access program for Curio Trekker, as the company builds toward full-scale commercialization this spring. Curio is now taking pre-orders for the first commercial kits that are compatible with fresh frozen tissue sections. This technology will be easily applicable to a wide range of sample types, including Formalin-Fixed Paraffin-Embedded (FFPE), which Curio plans to launch in the second half of 2024.

Neil Henderson, M.D., Ph.D., Chair of Tissue Repair and Regeneration and Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow in Clinical Science at the University of Edinburgh said, "We’re excited to trial the Curio Trekker spatial mapping kit. This one-hour protocol upstream of our standard single-nuclei RNA-sequencing assays should greatly facilitate our ability to interrogate the key cellular and molecular mechanisms regulating the human liver fibrotic niche."