BD Completes Cellular Research Acquisition

Franklin Lakes, N.J.-based BD Life Sciences, a segment of Becton, Dickinson and Company, has completed the acquisition of Cellular Research Inc., a biotechnology research and development company founded by innovators from Silicon Valley and Stanford University.

BD has more than 30 years experience in developing cell sorting technologies, known collectively as flow cytometry. According to the company, this acquisition sets the stage for the next generation of commercial tools in the field of single cell genomic analysis, widely acknowledged by leading academic and industry researchers as the next frontier of biological discovery and clinical advancement. Cellular Research has developed advanced tools for massively parallel single cell genetic analysis based on their proprietary molecular indexing technology to enable gene expression profiles from single cells.

Combined, the BD and Cellular Research technologies provide researchers an integrated sample prep workflow to quantify and study gene expression in large numbers of individual cells, enabling higher resolution biology. The comprehensive workflow is intended to enable researchers to make new discoveries in single cell analysis, promoting the understanding of the genomic diversity of single cells and helping to identify new approaches for targeted clinical diagnostics and therapies in important fields such as immunology, immune-oncology and personalized medicine.

“The acquisition of Cellular Research, combined with our existing cell sorting technology, will provide our customers with a more complete and simplified workflow solution for single cell analysis,” said Linda Tharby, executive vice president and president of BD Life Sciences. “The addition of Cellular Research builds on our GenCell acquisition and underscores BD’s commitment to a genomics strategy focused on next generation sequencing (NGS) sample preparation.”

Since September last year, BD and Cellular Research have had a collaboration to develop single cell analysis workflows for Cellular Research’s Precise product line and BD’s FACS instruments and software. The collaboration resulted in a study presented at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) Meeting that demonstrated the combined workflow enhances the detection and quantification of gene expression in single and/or multiple cell samples.

“Integrating BD’s single cell sorting capabilities and world-leading expertise with our next generation single cell genomic technologies will provide researchers with a scalable, cost-effective approach to high resolution gene expression studies,” said Stephen Fodor, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Cellular Research. “We are excited about the possibilities we can offer researchers by combining our expertise, and believe it has the potential to meet several unmet needs in single cell genomics research.”