10x Genomics has been remarkably good at figuring out where biology is going next.
In this wide-ranging conversation, co-founder and CEO Serge Saxonov explains why. Despite decades of genomics, “we still understand very little biology.” For 10x, the way forward has been to build better tools for measuring it and to work backward from the biological questions rather than forward from a particular technology.
That philosophy helped drive the single-cell revolution and 10x’s move into spatial biology. Now the company has launched Atera, its new spatial platform designed to measure the whole transcriptome with single-cell sensitivity and at much greater scale. Customer shipments are expected to begin later this year. Saxonov argues that spatial is becoming something much bigger than another research niche. It’s a way of bringing molecules, cells and tissues into the same view.
Going beyond RNA? Saxonov discusses 10x’s recent moves into proteomics and why he believes binder-based approaches currently offer the best path to scale. And he says 10x is investing directly in clinical diagnostics, pointing to therapy selection in oncology and autoimmune disease as two early opportunities. Getting closer to patients, he says, should also help 10x understand what its next generation of technologies needs to do.
What would convince Saxonov that all this is succeeding? Not another instrument or another omic. It would be a measurable improvement in clinical-trial success.
“The next decade is going to be wild,” he says.
