Eliminating Barriers to Single Cell Analysis
Fluent Biosciences was founded in 2018, growing from a long collaborative history of co-founders Adam Abate (Professor of Bioengineering, UCSF) and Sepher Kiani (CEO, Fluent BioSciences) to commercialize new, groundbreaking tools for single cell analysis. Traditional methods for single cell studies typically require complex instrumentation or custom microfluidic consumables to isolate single cells into distinct, nanoliter volume reaction vessels. These approaches however have limitations in experimental scale and configuration, and a considerable barrier to entry for new researchers. Dr. Abate’s key innovation, Pre-templated Instant Partitions (PIPs), which has been further developed and commercialized by Fluent BioSciences, overcomes all of these challenges in a simple, cost-effective, reagent based platform.
Fluent’s mission is to accelerate the understanding of biology and disease by eliminating barriers to single-cell analysis. Fluent continues to develop solutions in the industry with exciting applications and results from our early customers and collaborators across a broad range of fields including neurobiology, cancer, and therapeutic drug development.
Why Single Cell RNA Sequencing?
All multicellular organisms are comprised of complex organizations of specialized cells. Understanding the function, organization, and interaction between these diverse cell populations is a foundation of modern biology. Recent developments in molecular methods, microfluidic manipulation of individual cells, and high-throughput next-generation sequencing (NGS) have enabled groundbreaking new methods to quantify the gene expression profiles of thousands of individual cells simultaneously.
Industry Limitations
Current systems and commercial applications for single cell transcriptomic analysis have a variety of limitations. Most systems require complex, expensive instrumentation and microfluidic-based consumables that add considerable capital expense which puts these powerful methods out of reach of many researchers. Sample input scale is typically fixed, and the inflexibility in sample scale limits the breadth of experiments possible. Single-cell transcriptional analysis also requires significant expertise to establish in a researcher’s lab, further limiting the spread of these powerful methods.
Single Cell Biology Made Simple
Fluent has developed a unique and easily accessible solution to single-cell transcriptional analysis that overcomes these critical barriers to researcher accessibility, and enables application of these methods at previously inaccessible scales. Fluent’s platform technology is based on Pre-templated Instant Partitions (PIPs). This key innovation enables spontaneous assembly of uniform-volume nanoliter-scale reaction vessels without the need for complex, expensive instrumentation or microfluidic consumables.
PIPs enable capture, manipulation, and analysis of individual cells or molecules in massively parallelized reactions using laboratory standard plasticware and common benchtop instrumentation. PIPs have been applied to a multitude of applications including identification of rare biological targets, cancer diagnostics from liquid biopsy, pharmaceuticals development, and massively parallelized analysis of single-cell RNA transcriptomes (PIPseq).
For single-cell RNA sequencing, Fluent offers reagent kits for purchase, as well as a convenient service option. Our reagent kits come in two sizes, T2 (for capture of up to 2,000 cells) and T20 (for capture up to 20,000 cells), which can be run in a researcher’s lab from cell capture through NGS and analysis takes place on Fluent’s Cloud Platform. Our service option allows the ease of cell capture with only 10 minutes of hands-on time with a Fluent front-end kit (“A kit”). Then, customers simply ship their samples to Fluent for downstream processing from library prep and NGS through primary data analysis, with no instrumentation logistics or constraints.
Get Started with Single Cell Sequencing
Are you interested in more information on our service offerings or want to discuss whether Fluent is the right solution for your research needs?
Visit our product pages for more information or contact us at sales@fluentbio.com.
