For the first time ever, scientists can peer into how genes are physically distributed within their cell and tissue samples. This means that instead of seeing how much of a gene therapy is accepted by cells in a sample, researchers can now see how much, in which cells, and where those cells are relative to each other. FISSEQ technology (fluorescent In-Situ Sequencing) also allows them to study the molecular characteristics of cells beyond just genes, including proteins, metabolites, and transcriptomes. With the help of this new technology, we may finally uncover the comprehensive relationships between cells that cause therapies work with some patients but fail with others.

In an era of medicine where we can build technologies that find and change one DNA base pair out of 1 billion, it is becoming increasingly important to develop tools to observe these phenomena at that same level of resolution. Before this technology, “researchers were limited to sequencing 2-3 genes in one sample of pulverized cells – now they can image 6,000 without the need to grind them.” – Evan Daugharthy, PhD Candidate, Harvard Med School

Readcoor was founded in 2017 after years of development by scientists and leaders from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. The company has been funded by numerous global organizations like the Bill and Melinda Fates Foundation and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), and to date they have raised $25 million in funding.

“It’s tremendously rewarding to see that FISSEQ is now ready to spring into the real world where it can have an enormous impact on human lives by advancing understanding of disease mechanisms and enabling development of new diagnostics and therapeutics,” - Wyss Institute Founding Director Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D.