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[MUSIC PLAYING]
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Howdy, and welcome to Close to the Edge, the show from GEN Edge where we invite leading executives, scientists, and innovators from groundbreaking biotech and pharma companies to discuss their science, technology, and their business strategy. I'm Alex Philippidis, senior business editor with Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News, the world's first biotech publication proudly covering the industry for more than 40 years.
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: And I'm Jonathan Grinstein, senior editor at GEN Media Group. I write for GEN and her new sister journal, GEN Biotechnology. And I also just launched a Vanguard podcast series called The Leading Strand where have candid conversations with pioneers of biotechnology. In The Leading Strand, each episode features a biotech topic matching one of the more than 100 Mary-Ann Liebert journals from astrobiology to forensic genomics.
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: And we have a particular emphasis on health and medicine, so looking at things like human gene therapy.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Close to the Edge is the flagship video program from GEN Edge which delivers premium in-depth biotech business news and strategy reporting, plus company profiles technology innovation and Key Opinion Leader, or KOL, interviews. Our sister peer-reviewed journal, GEN Biotechnology, will be publishing a study later this month based on data analysis conducted by 10x Genomics' Visium Spatial Proteogenomics, or Visium SPG tool, which couples spatial gene expression with immunofluorescence protein co-detection.
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: If you'd like, on our website, you can also watch any of the interviews and panel discussions of The State of Biotech 2023, which is our recent virtual summit sponsored exclusively by Cytiva in which luminaries from industry and academia discuss the latest research developments, innovations, and disruptive technologies. And don't miss GEN's virtual summit coming up in January 24, The State of Cell and Gene Therapy.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Today, we're pleased and privileged to welcome to Close to the Edge Serge Saxonov, PhD, co-founder, and CEO of 10X Genomics. 10x is committed to a mission of developing and delivering powerful, reliable tools that fuel scientific discoveries and drive exponential progress to master biology to advance human health. 10x Genomics tools include innovative single cell spatial and in-situ technologies designed to enable discoveries across oncology, immunology, neuroscience, and other areas.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: 10x's tools have been cited in more than 6,100 research papers. Serge, thanks so much for joining us on Close to the Edge.
SERGE SAXONOV: Thank you. Really glad to be here.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: I'd like to start with how you got interested in science and genomics, how you made it your field of study and ultimately your career.
SERGE SAXONOV: That's a really interesting question. So actually, it takes me back to college. I was an applied math major and generally had a reasonable facility with programming and with math and statistics and such. And I had a really deep interest in biology, but pretty early kind of found that I wasn't particularly great in a lab with a pipette and-- but at the same time, found that of my skills in programming and in data analysis were actually really useful in some context of what was at that time an emerging field of bioinformatics.
SERGE SAXONOV: I was working in a lab that was kind of transitioning into doing a lot of analysis, the analysis. And I was working on really interesting biological problems. But that of ended up being like a really nice convergence of my deep interest in biology and also where I happen to be-- had some proclivity and some skills. And then kind of-- I guess the second part of that is that I remember this is like late '90s when I was in college and thinking about where the world was going.
SERGE SAXONOV: It was becoming increasingly clear that so much of biology is really going to be about data. There's this emergence of high throughput tools that were coming online, especially with microarrays, but also started to think in terms of sequencing. And you can kind of see this future where biology is going to become more and more of a very data-intensive information science.
SERGE SAXONOV: And it was pretty clear that the field of bioinformatics and computational biology on top of just being very-- not very natural fit for my interests and abilities, was also the thing that I was going to be incredibly powerful and important in the future. And so in college, I decided-- after college, decided to go to grad school. And at that time, weren't a lot of bioinformatics programs available out there, but there was a great one at Stanford.
SERGE SAXONOV: And that's where I went to grad school, and that's where I got my PhD. So that was my start. And certainly, I think a lot of those notions from back then have been kind of proving out as we have seen the project-- the trajectory of life sciences and science in biology more generally.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Serge, you were at-- before 10x, at 23andMe. I believe you were employee number 1.
SERGE SAXONOV: Yeah, yeah. So that was an interesting story too. So coming kind of-- as I was finishing grad school, this was-- and again, being kind of in the middle of Silicon Valley, there was a lot of ideas floating around at that time that we had-- me and my lab mate had as well around kind of the convergence of web advances and technologies and what was happening in genetics, and especially in genetics technology and with this advanced and scaling of microarrays by companies like Affymetrix and Illumina.
SERGE SAXONOV: And so we had this notion. I was like, hey, at some point in the future, people-- it will become possible to tell people about their genetics in a really comprehensive fashion. And the best way to do that would be through this emerging set of Web 2.0 technologies. And so we started kind of sketching out these ideas. And then as I was talking to one of the professors that I was working with about what I was planning to do, which is doing-- kind of essentially starting a company along these lines, he mentioned that, well, actually, I know about this new effort that I was formulating.
SERGE SAXONOV: And I noticed a few people who are about to start a company doing something quite similar. And so I ended up getting connected to Anne Wojcicki and Linda Avey and a couple of other folks that were just kind of putting together some thoughts and funding around forming a company, which became-- ended up being 23andMe and joined forces with them. And there was a really incredible experience. We were the first ones in the world to really start that kind of processing human genomes at scale and trying to extract value to the person-- to synthesize value to the person-- for the person's actual genome.
SERGE SAXONOV: It was really, really exciting. It was a really fun and very rewarding kind of time.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Now, 23andMe is pivoting of late into drug discovery. How much do you think the population genomics platform that you helped build can be mined successfully toward novel drug discovery?
SERGE SAXONOV: Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing about 23andMe, even from the early days-- and that was part of the reason why we joined forces with Anne was that they-- we had this idea that-- to ultimately-- the really promise of the company was in ultimately making use of that data and being able to drive new insights into biology once you aggregate a lot of customers and a lot of genomes and the phenotype information and actually deriving insights, correlations phenotypes to genotypes and using that to drive insights into health and ultimately development of therapeutics.
SERGE SAXONOV: So it may-- from the outside, it appeared as a pivot, but that was always part of the plan for the company. And I give Anne a lot of credit for kind of persevering with that vision and building the company toward that vision. I think the database is very powerful. And there's been increasing over the last decade or so kind of appreciation for how much you can use human genetics to really improve-- both accelerate your drug development but also greatly reduce the odds of successful drugs coming out, again, if you use human genetics as you use a baseline.
SERGE SAXONOV: So I think there's a lot of promise to that approach. And the database is certainly very powerful and unique. In this world, I don't have any special insight. I've been out of the company for a long time now. So I don't have any special insight outside of that. But from first principles, there's a really strong case to be made that there's a powerful potential here.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Now, you joined Ben Hindson and Kevin Ness to co-found 10x back in 2012. How did you come to move on from 23andMe and co-create 10x and why?
SERGE SAXONOV: Yeah, yeah, so there's a little step in between there. So I was-- when I was at 23andMe as we build the company, very much-- we envisioned ourselves as being very much a data science and software company. And we purchased chips from Illumina. And we ran those, and we had another lab that we set up that we outsourced the actual processing of the samples to. But very much saw ourselves as a genetics and bioinformatics and software company.
SERGE SAXONOV: And it was fun. It was awesome. We heard a lot of people that were just like us. It was a great experience. But at the same time, I also felt this itch of trying to actually create better data like tools that could generate better insights because to an extent, when you resign yourself to just data analysis, you're limited to what the existing tools could produce.
SERGE SAXONOV: And oftentimes, we kind of face this issue where the insights that you most like to draw would necessitate the development of new technologies to get at the measurements that you need to understand biology better. And so that of started this edge of for me to actually kind go further upstream and understand the tools that were being built to generate those data. And it just so happened that a close friend of mine, Kevin Ness, started recruiting me into a company that he co-founded.
SERGE SAXONOV: That was a small company at that time called QuantaLife where the guys build this technology for doing droplet digital PCR, essentially the world's most precise DNA counter analyzer. And I ended up joining as a-- to build data applications on top of the platform. And it was a really great experience, very different. Whereas at 23andMe, so many people were kind of like me, came from a similar background, computational background.
SERGE SAXONOV: At QuantaLife when I joined, there wasn't really anyone like me. Everything was-- everyone was a chemist or hardware engineer. Everyone spoke in terms of atoms. I was used to speak in terms of bits and very different language, very different way to think about the world. But at the same time, it was like really invigorating because the kinds of things we could do together in this very multidisciplinary environment were just incredibly powerful.
SERGE SAXONOV: These ideas-- I would come up, and I would talk to Ben. Ben was a co-founder. Ben Hindson was a co-founder at QuantaLife as well, chief science officer there. And I would chat with Ben. And I would ask, hey, I have this idea. Would something like this be possible? And my expectation would be probably not, but just I throw it out there.
SERGE SAXONOV: And he would kind of stare in the distance and like, yeah, you know, yeah. And sometimes, he would have the reverse kind of experience where he would ask me a question. I'd say, yeah, that's actually could be pretty straightforward. And it was this incredibly productive partnership relationship that we had there. And it wasn't just the two of us, but within the company.
SERGE SAXONOV: And so there was a great learning experience for me personally. So now, QuantaLife, we ended up launching our product into the market. And we got acquired shortly thereafter by a larger company, Bio-Rad. And that product that quantitative, Droplet Digital PCR product, ended up being kind of one of the flagships, kind of the jewel in maybe in the virus product portfolio over the last decade.
SERGE SAXONOV: Plus, has done really, really well in the market. It's the leading platform, both I think within Bio-Rad and also more broadly for digital PCR. And sometime after the acquisition, several of us left Bio-Rad. And I remember taking some time off several months after that and just kind of looking around what-- happened to buy a house there, went to see like-- started on a few classes at Stanford, kind of trying to figure out where my mind would take me next.
SERGE SAXONOV: And then at some point, Ben kind of went back to Australia for a while. That's where he's from, and then came back. And then we started getting pings and calls from other people about maybe we should-- about doing things. And so we got together. Literally in a coffee shop, Ben and I and started talking about what are the big problems out there, what does the world need?
SERGE SAXONOV: And it was pretty clear at that time that NGS, Next-Generation Sequencing, was becoming-- was going to become-- you can fast forward the clock and take it as a premise that sequencing capacity is going to become ubiquitous. It wasn't yet back then, but the future was becoming clear. At the same time, it was also clear to us-- and some of that was informed by my experiences at 23andMe. Some of us just kind of looking and going to conferences and seeing how-- what people in the biology talks were kind of talking about and what the genomics people are talking about and how there was this a bit of a Gulf, how some of the-- what outstanding problems would need to be solved and especially around kind of single-cell biology, long-read sequencing, some other elements.
SERGE SAXONOV: And a lot of them had this common theme that could-- that you needed an ability to run many, many reactions in parallel, biological reactions. And if you could combine that with the next-generation sequencing readout, you could really build really powerful kind of fundamental technology that could be applied in many multiple different applications that would be really powerful as we think of next 5, 10 years ahead.
SERGE SAXONOV: And so we sketched out some ideas and incorporated and started-- called up a few investors and got some money. And during that early period, Kevin Ness, who again, recruited me back into QuantaLife, also joined us as a third co-founder. And the key thing here is that from the very beginning, 10x was a very multidisciplinary company. So my background, like I said, is computational biology.
SERGE SAXONOV: Ben is a chemist by training. And Kevin is a hardware engineer, microfluidics expert. And so we had that as the foundation of the company, initially working out of Kevin's garage and raised some seed money, proved-- made some proof of principle experiments. Did a lot of work in that first year iterating on the fundamentals of the technology. Changed their kind of-- changed several times, changed our approach until we converged on what ended up ended up calling GEMs, Gel beads in Emulsions.
SERGE SAXONOV: That was the fundamental technology that ended up being the foundation of our Chromium franchise for the future. So that was kind of the start of 10x. And a lot of it-- a lot of these things happen to be to start around just the human element. For me, a lot of it had to do with just I wanted to work with Ben. Again, it was a lot of fun.
SERGE SAXONOV: It was a very productive kind of relationship. And we wanted to recreate it as we started at 10x. But then as the company-- as we started, as we kind of figured things out and figured out technology elements and started getting more and more ambitious in terms of applications, we realized that there is a really, really massive and important company that we really have an opportunity to build here.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Great. Over to you, Jonathan.
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: Thanks, Alex. I loved hearing that story, Serge. I mean, I did a lot of single-cell RNA sequencing in my graduate days. And I started a little over 13 years ago on it with some microfluidics. I was really janky and needed to have spatially physically separated cells, and you look at them under the microscope. And I remember when 10x came out, I was just like-- my entire graduate work like [INAUDIBLE]..
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: This had only happened at a few years earlier or later. But anyways, so wonderful hearing those stories. But yeah, I wanted to hear about 10X. What are the areas of focus now, and how have these evolved over the past 11 years?
SERGE SAXONOV: Yeah, no, so we certainly have come a long way since those early days when we started in our garage. We ended up shipping our very-- our first product in 2015. And really, 2016 is one with the explosion of single-cell X interest with the Chromium platform that we really-- the commercial trajectory really started taking off. And really, that was the platform, as you were alluding to, really kind of catalyzed the single-cell revolution that's been taking over-- has taken over the world, or at least the world of biology over the last several years.
SERGE SAXONOV: We have always-- and so since that point, we've been scaling that platform many different applications. We're continuously been focused on product innovation. That's kind of the fundamental premise of the company. We see ourselves as very much an R&D engine kind of seeing-- thinking really deeply about what the world of the future needs, what problems need to be addressed. And then working backwards in terms of what technology needs to be built in order to get the world there.
SERGE SAXONOV: That's how we came to converge on that GEM platform, the Chromium platform. And that's how we've thought about all the products we've developed, whether it's been building out more applications on top of the Chromium platform, doing more different types of single-cell experiments, pushing the capabilities forward, whether in terms of numbers of cells or sensitivities, new analytes, multiomics.
SERGE SAXONOV: And we're continuing to do that. So the Chromium franchise is pretty well established now. There's many, many thousands of papers out there, many, many thousands of labs that use it. It's really well known. At the same time, it's still-- in our view, it's still very early in the adoption of this technology because if you think about it, single cell is just-- is the fundamental unit of biology.
SERGE SAXONOV: This is how if you're starting with cells, you really need to be measuring molecules without losing that single-cell context. And so while a lot of genomics researchers and early technology sophisticated people know single cell were very prominent in those markets, it's still very early relative to the rest of life science research. And so we're still-- we're investing very, very aggressively and very intentionally into the Chromium capabilities product development.
SERGE SAXONOV: A lot of the focus is now on top of adding new capabilities, but also making the system kind of more amenable for broader and broader customer base. So in terms of streamlining workflows, improving the data analysis capabilities, having-- allowing people to run this experiment at a lower price per sample. So those are the kinds of investments we're making. And we're also now seeing more and more use of that platform in translational settings, so going from where initially the platform started with very basic discovery research, kind of mapping out atlasing tissues, mapping out developmental biology pathways to now where there's more and more interest in turning these tools in the direction of translational kind of biomarker analysis like doing cohort studies, disease healthy versus healthy controls, and finding those differences.
SERGE SAXONOV: So we see a lot of huge potential to that platform or investing. At the same time, some number of years ago-- and in fact, at the very beginning of the company, we kind of saw that at some point, once people kind of figure out what is happening at the right level of resolution, the single cell, the next natural question is, where is it happening and how are, those cells actually arranged with respect to each other in tissue?
SERGE SAXONOV: And that's a question of spatial analysis. And that's something that we started thinking about pretty intensely quite a few years ago and invested and brought a new-- actually, made a couple of acquisitions and brought a new platform to market in the-- what's called Visium platform. This is now a few years ago. That's been really-- it's been growing quite nicely. And we've been adding more and more capabilities.
SERGE SAXONOV: And there's another major, major capability that's coming to deliver single-cell resolution for the Visium platform. Both Visium and Chromium rely on next-generation sequencing as part of its workflow to analyze the molecules that we either barcode in terms of single cells or spatially on a Visium platform. So a lot of innovation that's happening there. A lot of work, a lot of interest from our customers.
SERGE SAXONOV: And then most recently, we launched our platform-- third platform, Xenium, which is what's called an in-situ analysis. Basically, unlike all genetic analyzers that have existed before, whether it's going back to the days of PCR or microarrays or sequencing where the way you analyze molecules is you extract them from your tissue of interest from your cells and then separately put them onto a separate platform for doing the analysis, what is really different and remarkable and fascinating about the in-situ approach is that you don't do any of that extraction and intermediation.
SERGE SAXONOV: You actually analyze the molecules directly in their native state in tissue. And so you get to measure where those-- those molecules, but you also see precisely where they are with respect to other molecules with respect to other cells speck to tissues. And this is something-- so the technology started at least conceptually emerging back around 2011 in those early days.
SERGE SAXONOV: And as so many things in our field have come out of George [INAUDIBLE] explorations and maybe a few other people. And it felt like science fiction. Only even several years ago, it still felt like science fiction, the ability to be able to do that. And now, with the Xenium platform being others, there's a convergence of technologies have come together to actually make it a reality.
SERGE SAXONOV: And that's something that's been incredibly exciting. We've made a concerted effort within the company to make it a huge priority for us in terms of product development over the last several years and also kind of on the basis of several acquisitions that we made back in 2020. And then over the course of the past year, also in terms of scaling our operations and scaling our commercial infrastructure to really to bring this platform to market.
SERGE SAXONOV: So this has been much of the story of the past year for us, is the launch of the Xenium platform and has gone really well-- commercially has gone really well operationally. And one of the things that's incredibly exciting to us is that this is still-- this is just the very beginning. There's tons and tons of technological headroom on this platform to keep innovating for the next 20 plus years.
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: So you kind of answered this here, but just kind of want to really hone it down in terms of 10x business strategy and strategy for growth. I mean, you spoke of it as a very organic process. Do you think of things as like we're building an instrument, we need to build some consumables, we need to do applications, or is it really this kind of fluid solution-focused thing, or are-- you really have some landmarks where we got to put up a new machine in five years.
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: We got to put-- are you in that of mindset right now?
SERGE SAXONOV: Yeah, it's a-- I mean, it's a good question, right? So there's two elements maybe to the answer. First of all, our primary imperative and the way we drive all decision making in the company is start with the problem first and work backwards. And we try really hard not to get too attached to any particular technology or anything in particular that we might have already have internally and always try to focus on what is the best solution to the problem that we're trying to address, right?
SERGE SAXONOV: And we spent quite a bit of time both internally kind of thinking from first principles, what are those applications, what are those problems that need addressing and also what technologies one would need to develop to address them. But also spend quite a bit of time externally talking both to our customers to really refine those questions and talking to a lot of our customers external people about what technologies exist out there and then kind of including that-- incorporating that into our thinking.
SERGE SAXONOV: I think it is really important. We take a lot of pride in terms of the kind of team that we have built and the capabilities we have internally. But a lot of emphasis on building out capabilities, but also kind of recognize that we don't always have-- we don't have a monopoly in smart people and clever people and ideas out there.
SERGE SAXONOV: And so from that perspective, that's what oftentimes leads to us acquiring companies and ideas and technologies that are out there. That has been the-- the M&A strategy in the past has been very much and going forward is part of our product development strategic process in that fashion. We do have-- as far as a notion of the business model, again, we are not-- I don't like to draw any bright lines like we're going to do this, we're never going to do that.
SERGE SAXONOV: It is very natural in our industry to have a instrument and consumables business model. And there is a certain attractive simplicity to it, in the sense that you provide an instrument that's a source of upfront revenue. And then as customers use that instrument, they pay you money. They buy consumables from you. And if you have a good business, if you have well differentiated, you can charge more for it than it costs you to make it.
SERGE SAXONOV: And so you make money that way. And that has been our approach. And big part of the premise here is innovation, right? The more we invest in innovation, the more differentiated our products are. And the more we can drive the economics to make sure we can invest back in the innovation in that of self-reinforcing flywheel effect. So that's how we think about the world.
SERGE SAXONOV: We definitely think about different generations of technology, and especially when you look at something like Xenium, and we-- when you have a 10 to 20 year type horizon, we definitely see lots of advances that can be made in terms of both new consumables and new capabilities and applications and also ultimately new instruments. Although that said, we're still very much in the early stages of launching this instrument.
SERGE SAXONOV: And we've made it explicitly very much future proof for quite a long time to be able to add more applications and more capabilities on top of it.
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: So I think it'd be great if we brought the conversation back a bit more into the spatial and single-cell stuff and what you guys are really touching in terms of research and how you're influencing our knowledge base and whatnot. I mean, it's incredible that single cell has basically become just a standard tool. And spatial biology kind of has its wave that it's riding right now. And do-- how long do you think the spatial biology bubble can last?
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: Do you think it's a bubble? Do you think it's going to stay single cell? What's your feeling there?
SERGE SAXONOV: Well, I don't think it's a bubble. I think it's a fundamental shift into a new way of doing science. I think single cell in many ways, it is like you said. It's a standard. But back to the point I was making earlier, it's a standard in a substantial but still early market. I think there's lots and lots of people who should be using single cell, who will be using single cell who are still not.
SERGE SAXONOV: So I would say the Chromium franchise is sizable, but it's still early days relative to where it will go. Spatial is even earlier, much earlier. We're just coming out of the gate. But if you just look at both the potential of it from first principles, which I'll touch, on and then also look in the trajectory just out of the gate, we talked about-- we recently had a press release around having 100 shipments of our instruments which is-- which we accomplished in a very short amount of time.
SERGE SAXONOV: It has-- if you look at the trajectory, it's very, very few platforms you can think historically that have had that kind of take off so quickly. You really have to go back to NGS to have a predicate, and maybe NGS is the only predicate for this kind of a system. And there's pretty strong reasons to believe why-- to see why spatial will actually ultimately become bigger than NGS because the way to think about it, one way is-- in terms of the progress of biological hierarchies, what kind of biology are you going to be analyzing?
SERGE SAXONOV: We started with analyzing molecules. What are the molecules in your samples? And that gives you some information, but it's pretty muddled information when you can't put it in the context of individual cells because that's where the actual biology is happening, right? Cells are the primary actors in human biology. And so with the advent of single-cell technologies, you are able to measure molecules in the right context with single cells.
SERGE SAXONOV: So that takes you to the next level of information. But the next level, a set of questions to really understand biology is you need to understand where the cells are and how they form-- they come together to form tissues, so molecule, cells, and tissues. And spatial gives you those all three levels of information to really fully understand the biology. So from that perspective, it's a culmination of what we've been trying to measure biologically across many, many different applications.
SERGE SAXONOV: Technologically, it is also a culmination of several huge trends. One is just genetic analysis like sequencing. The real-- we've been improving sequencing in terms of throughput, in terms of fidelity. But the ultimate goal of being able to sequence molecules to actually be able to sequence and know the context of what they do biologically, and spatial gives you that.
SERGE SAXONOV: So in that sense, it's a culmination of progress that we've been having over the last several decades in sequencing. You can also look at it as the culmination of the progress has been done in histology, imaging, and pathology techniques where we've been for decades kind of looking at stains or immunohistochemistry or FISH-based techniques where you're looking at tissues. You're looking at them under a microscope, But you're only able to see one, maybe a handful of markers at a time.
SERGE SAXONOV: And with spatial, you're essentially taking that need, that approach and scaling it up to where now you can measure thousands-- hundreds of thousands of markers in your tissue. So it's a culmination of that. In fact, it's a merging of those technology trends. And then on top of that, you also are merging-- it's the culmination of the multiomics need and notion where people-- you've had these very splintered markets, even in life science tools space.
SERGE SAXONOV: Some people measuring proteins using a set of tools. You had people measuring nucleotides using a different set of tools, cells, tissues. But with the spatial technologies, you kind of really have a merger of all of these into a single approach that can give you all the information together. And that-- the synthesis of it is actually a much more powerful than the splintered view.
SERGE SAXONOV: So from first principles, you can tell this has the potential to be as big or likely bigger than anything else that has come before. And then when you look at the trajectory right now, there's certainly a lot of buzz. But the buzz is accompanied by real people spending a lot of money and spending real fast on buying these instruments. So we are very, very energized that this is really the future.
SERGE SAXONOV: And it's just-- we're just getting going spatial.
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: Yeah, absolutely. Alex, back over to you.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Thanks, Jonathan. Continuing on spatial, Serge, do you think-- given the potential you see for a lot more growth in spatial, do you think spatial is on track to take over from single cell or is multiomics more of the future technology or competitive challenge?
SERGE SAXONOV: Yeah, it's an interesting question. We got quite a bit. And it's in a way the question we ask internally as well, that interplay between single-cell technologies and spatial technologies, and in fact, within between, our three platforms Chromium, Visium, and Xenium. And the honest answer is well, we know that the three platforms together, those approaches combined have a massive, massive opportunity ahead.
SERGE SAXONOV: This is really the future of biology. You start with tissue, start with cells. You're going to need to preserve single-cell context to-- whether it's for basic research or for ultimately clinical diagnostics, for all kinds of applications. We kind of see that as very clear premise. So we know the world is going there. Now, which technology is-- precisely which of these platforms will find the sweet spot in which applications on what time frame?
SERGE SAXONOV: There's a lot of open questions there. And to some extent, we have to have some intellectual humility in that we don't necessarily know the answer at any given time, how it will precisely shake out. I think there's definitely an overlap in applications. And we're definitely seeing some amount of interest where people are picking up. Where in the past, they might have used single-cell approaches.
SERGE SAXONOV: Now, they're definitely interested in spatial because it gives them that additional view. We're also seeing that in a lot of cases, spatial experiments also lead people to go back and do more single-cell experiments because once they see an interesting finding in the spatial context, they want to go back and take a census of all the cells that exist in that particular tissue using a single-cell approach to give additional context to the experiment.
SERGE SAXONOV: So there's also that interplay. We'll have to-- I mean, to some extent, it's something that we're going to have to see and how it plays out. It's a question of somewhat empirical questions of science and technology. But for us, the core principle is that we don't really mind kind of whichever way things play out.
SERGE SAXONOV: That's the reason we invest in all three platforms. And that's why we've been promoting all three to make sure that ultimately scientists have the best tools for whatever applications and however science turns out to be used.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Now, speaking of multiomic, recently 10x announced the commercial launch of the new Chromium single-cell gene expression flex high-throughput multiomic profiling kit. If you could talk about the kit and how it's designed to work first off.
SERGE SAXONOV: Yeah, so a lot of words there, right? Yeah, I have to admit, sometimes it sounds pretty complex. It is-- the underlying technology does get pretty complex, but ultimately, what that kit allows you to do is actually something that's fairly simple. It allows you to measure gene expression in individual cells across very large scale from thousands to hundreds of thousands of cells to millions of cells in a single experiment.
SERGE SAXONOV: Massive, massive scale, maybe up to be-- we're sure that AGB did an experiment that showed 10 million cells in a single experiment. And also, on top of that, for those cells, you can also measure proteins at very large scale, hundreds of markers per cell at the same time. So it's a very powerful tool. It's also-- flex allows customers to fix their tissues when they first extract them.
SERGE SAXONOV: So you can then process-- batch them and process them, run them at the time of you're choosing. Going back to the point I made earlier about how a lot of what we're also doing with single cell, with the Chromium franchise is make it just more usable, more amenable for more workflows for people. And also, if you have a number of samples now with flex, you can really combine them and batch them.
SERGE SAXONOV: So you can really dramatically lower your cost per sample to just a few hundred dollars when running these experiments. So it really enables a pretty massive increase in throughput, in performance, and in terms of the affordability as well, and bringing in this amazing capability, multiomic capabilities at the same time of being able to measure large, large numbers of proteins together with gene full gene expression.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Now, 10x says that the tool kit allows for simultaneous measurement of RNA and protein from millions of cells at significantly lower cost than other single-cell multiomics tools. First off, what drives that cost? Is it single-cell library prep, or is it more sequencing?
SERGE SAXONOV: So both parts of those are relevant to the cost of the experiment, for sure. Now, one of the things that has been really great for us and for the community at large is that the cost of sequencing has been on this downward curve, right? And in fact, that was one of the premises back when we started the company, imagining the future when sequencing is-- capacity is ubiquitous.
SERGE SAXONOV: We also imagine that the cost of sequencing is going to keep coming down and-- which means that we can-- with us building applications that make use of sequencing where sequencing as part of a workflow, those applications will over time just naturally become more and more affordable and more and more widely used. So certainly, that's been a great trend to see, and it has been helping us.
SERGE SAXONOV: We've also have been making our assays, our single-cell assays more and more efficient, which means that you actually need to use less and less sequencing per cell to glean same amount of data. And so that also reduces the overall cost of the experiment. And then like I mentioned earlier, by the ability to multiplex-- put multiple samples together into a single cell-- into a single single-cell experiment, you can now drive down your cost, the 10x price of that equation down as well.
SERGE SAXONOV: And so now, the economics are split kind of-- again, depending on how you run it, sometimes it's roughly 50/50 between our cost and sequencing cost. Sometimes it's actually-- the sequencing is actually a very small fraction of the overall cost, but it depends on how people are precisely kind of running their experiments. But overall, our imperative is that on both of these axes to keep making experiments more and more affordable and to enable larger and larger scale of these experiments.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: What costs and how does 10x quantify the savings from the tool kit in terms of either dollars or percent or however that is quantified?
SERGE SAXONOV: Yeah, I mean, it used to be-- so going back to flex, for example, it used to be that single cell was-- we started single cell roughly-- the cost of the kit itself and the sequencing was about 50/50. And this is-- back in the days, it was like about $1,300 on both sides of it. Now, with the flex kit in particular, when you multiplex sufficiently, you can get down to the price where that's an order of $400 on a single-cell side and only on order of $50 to $100 in terms of the sequencing side of it.
SERGE SAXONOV: So it is really kind of fundamentally changing the equation of what people can do. And it's still something that's new, I think, to a lot of people's calculus because, again, these capabilities are very, very novel to the world and massively enabling. So we see a lot of customers who are now adopting and envisioning larger and larger scale studies and efforts at larger and larger scales.
SERGE SAXONOV: And so many efforts that are, I think, in terms of now population scale type of single-cell analysis, which really wasn't possible until a few years ago.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: You spoke of sequencing costs going down. What effect have Illumina's, both its new products and its commercial challenges in recent years, had on 10x? With more competition, for example, has Illumina been more competitive in what it might charge?
SERGE SAXONOV: Well, it's hard for me to comment specifically on their commercial tactics. There's definitely more competition now on sequencing than there has been in a while. I think at the same time, Illumina partially driven by competition but also partially by the fundamental premise of their being elasticity in the market, they've released-- they've been releasing new products with NovaSeq, NovaSeq X now, that have been driving the cost per data point down pretty consistently, right?
SERGE SAXONOV: And we've been seeing that in the market. Now, the latest launch, NovaSeq X, is still kind of making its way into the market. It's still early days for them. And so not that many customers have actually-- are at the point where they can achieve the cost savings afforded by these new platforms. But it's certainly a trend that we've been seeing for 20 plus years on this next-generation sequencing curve.
SERGE SAXONOV: And it seems to be continuing. So it's definitely, like I said, great for us. And it benefits us and, I think, the life science research community more broadly as well.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Great. Over to you, Jonathan.
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: So I had a-- I don't know if you'd say it's a theoretical question or whatnot, but what do you think the next major leap in the field is in single cells, beyond jumping maybe just an order of magnitude and cells or reads. Do you think the tech has a resolution to look into DNA variants or protein variants, or what do you really think is the next frontier to break into here?
SERGE SAXONOV: Yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely kind of one axis that's very compelling in terms of measuring more analytes, right? So much of focus has been-- with single cell has been on gene expression. We've also made a lot of progress with epigenetic and open chromatin measurements, which has been very-- that's been a big business for us and has driven a lot of customer success.
SERGE SAXONOV: I definitely think there's a-- it's very compelling to use proteins-- to measure proteins in the single-cell level. And certainly, a lot of our customers have been doing that. I think there's a lot more that can be done there in terms of-- as we think about more along the lines which you were alluding to like post-translational modifications and things of that nature and so kind of really going more deeply into the proteome, the single-cell level.
SERGE SAXONOV: And just like expression, I think proteins should be measured, the level of the fundamental unit of biology, a single cell. So I think there's a lot more work that's going to be done there and is very interesting. DNA is potentially interesting. I mean, the hitch with DNA is that for the most part, it's static. So when you're trying to understand basic biology in most contexts or health and disease, it's not that informative by itself because it doesn't really change.
SERGE SAXONOV: It is compelling in the context of cancer. And so we do see that becoming more interesting in the future, especially as the cost of sequencing comes down because that has been one of the big barriers. If you want to sequence DNA, there's just so much to analyze there. So we do-- we definitely see that as a big trajectory. And I think-- and then you should be thinking in terms of multiomics and actually being able to measure all these analytes simultaneously, right?
SERGE SAXONOV: That's a really, really exciting direction and one that we have definitely enabled in some contexts. So being able to measure epigenetics and expression with our Multiome product has been very, very successful for us. Same thing that I can say with-- as I've been talking about earlier with proteins and gene expression. But kind of putting it all together, so you have all these different analytes and ways of looking at the cell, I think is very, very compelling and certainly the future.
SERGE SAXONOV: And then I would emphasize, again, the notion of going beyond just the most exciting developments for early technology adopters and making this technology more and more broadly adaptable for life science research and clinical community more generally because clearly, single-cell measurements have to be a foundation of how biology is done in the future.
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: Well, not to get too forward looking right now, but Alex, I know you had a few more questions.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Oh, sure. Thanks, Jonathan. I know 10x has been energetic or aggressive, take your choice of word, in protecting intellectual property rights. It's had court challenges with companies, competitors like Parse and NanoString and Vizgen. How much is this facilitated by the EU European unified patent court now that's in place? And how do you answer their argument that all this does is stifle innovation and limit competition?
SERGE SAXONOV: Well, I mean, our view actually helps innovation in a pretty fundamental way, like we are-- I mean, we've founded the company very much on the premise of innovation and investing innovation. And we see ourselves as an R&D engine ultimately. And when we invest in innovation into new product development, we do-- we're very diligent to making sure that we invest in it, we can also protect it and also protect the customers. If we're going to introduce new product, new technology to the market, we want to make sure that we are-- we have all the intellectual property to enable those products.
SERGE SAXONOV: And we've done-- we've made massive investments to make sure we have that. And then it is now become-- it's an inescapable logic. Once you do that, once you bring awesome products to market, well, you have to protect them. And so that's what we're doing. And that's what allows us to then keep investing into more innovation to bring more technology to market.
SERGE SAXONOV: So that's the fundamental premise of the company. And I think we have full conviction, this is what's also in the best interest of customers. And our track record shows that. We have launched many new breakthrough technologies. And it's always-- for us, it's always a pedal to the metal. We are always investing a lot, and we're always trying to bring new technologies to market as quickly as possible, listening to our customers and keeping their success and their science as our North Star.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Now, given the trajectory of introducing products and commercial progress, looking ahead what milestones commercially can we expect to see from 10x the rest of this year and into 2024?
SERGE SAXONOV: Well, we've talked a lot about our Xenium launch. And that certainly has been a big focus for us this year. And we mentioned-- I think the last bit of news that we shared was the 100 shipments milestone. And we've been scaling our commercial operations, the manufacturing, and R&D to keep driving that. And so we're feeling really good about the trajectory that Xenium has been on. At the same time, we have our two other franchises that we're also investing in Chromium and in Visium.
SERGE SAXONOV: So a lot to do the rest of the year. Looking forward to 2024 as well. We haven't given financial guidance on next year yet, but certainly, we've talked about what we expect for this year. And it's been great to see our progress so far as trajectory. We've had multiple beats and raises so far. And certainly feeling good about the trajectory of the company so far this year and what it means for the future.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Since we didn't mention or bring up a lot about Visium before, I know that a couple of years ago 10x was talking about maybe having a high resolution form called Visium HD. Any word on when we might expect to see that launched?
SERGE SAXONOV: Yeah, so we haven't given any updates on that. We are very-- we've been making great progress internally. We've been showing some data to our customers. It looks-- I mean, the data looks phenomenal. The technology has really come together in a really great way. We haven't given any updates on when it's going to become available, but we're very excited about the capabilities and certainly the customer demand.
SERGE SAXONOV: And I think we-- our goal is to deliver the product that's in line with customers they have come to expect of 10x and the amount of interest and just visceral demand that's out there in the market right now. So very excited about it. Stay tuned, I would say. We haven't shared that updates about when is it actually coming, yeah.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: And on goals, what are your major goals and hopes over the next 5 to 10 years looking longer term?
SERGE SAXONOV: Well, for us, we-- like I said, from the beginning, as we kind of started for-- congealing around this company and the concept of what we're building together, we became clear to us that we have a chance to build a really, really meaningful company. We'd like to think about things from first principles. I'd like to spend my time working on things that I have strong conviction or the most impactful things I could be possibly working on.
SERGE SAXONOV: Ultimately, that's why I'm in biology. That's why I'm in biotech. And we believe strongly that the best way to accelerate life science and accelerate biology is to build technologies, bring new technologies to advance new capabilities. And that's why we do what we do. And so by that logic, we have strong conviction that the kind of work we do here is quite possibly the most meaningful work one can do.
SERGE SAXONOV: And we have an opportunity to build one of the most meaningful and impactful companies in the world. And so that's going to be driven by technology innovation, which is the core of what we do, the foundation of 10X, and also ultimately growth in our markets, our existing markets. And as we look at 5, 10-year horizon, certainly, the applications of our technologies in the health care setting.
SERGE SAXONOV: And that is really what ultimately motivates us, is this ability we're focused on accelerating biology, but ultimately in the service of advancing human health. And I definitely as I think to the next 5-plus years, it's unambiguous in my mind that these technologies will absolutely be used in helping save countless, countless lives. And that's what we're ultimately driving toward.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Great. And just like that, sorry to say our time is drawing to a close. Thank you so much, Serge, for taking the time to be with us today.
SERGE SAXONOV: Thank you. This was a lot of fun. Really appreciate your time.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Great. And thanks to you for joining us on Close to the Edge. We'll have more insightful and more interesting interviews in the weeks and months ahead. For Jonathan Grinstein, I'm Alex Philippidis. Enjoy your day. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Howdy, and welcome to Close to the Edge, the show from GEN Edge where we invite leading executives, scientists, and innovators from groundbreaking biotech and pharma companies to discuss their science, technology, and their business strategy. I'm Alex Philippidis, senior business editor with Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News, the world's first biotech publication proudly covering the industry for more than 40 years.
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: And I'm Jonathan Grinstein, senior editor at GEN Media Group. I write for GEN and her new sister journal, GEN Biotechnology. And I also just launched a Vanguard podcast series called The Leading Strand where have candid conversations with pioneers of biotechnology. In The Leading Strand, each episode features a biotech topic matching one of the more than 100 Mary-Ann Liebert journals from astrobiology to forensic genomics.
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: And we have a particular emphasis on health and medicine, so looking at things like human gene therapy.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Close to the Edge is the flagship video program from GEN Edge which delivers premium in-depth biotech business news and strategy reporting, plus company profiles technology innovation and Key Opinion Leader, or KOL, interviews. Our sister peer-reviewed journal, GEN Biotechnology, will be publishing a study later this month based on data analysis conducted by 10x Genomics' Visium Spatial Proteogenomics, or Visium SPG tool, which couples spatial gene expression with immunofluorescence protein co-detection.
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: If you'd like, on our website, you can also watch any of the interviews and panel discussions of The State of Biotech 2023, which is our recent virtual summit sponsored exclusively by Cytiva in which luminaries from industry and academia discuss the latest research developments, innovations, and disruptive technologies. And don't miss GEN's virtual summit coming up in January 24, The State of Cell and Gene Therapy.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Today, we're pleased and privileged to welcome to Close to the Edge Serge Saxonov, PhD, co-founder, and CEO of 10X Genomics. 10x is committed to a mission of developing and delivering powerful, reliable tools that fuel scientific discoveries and drive exponential progress to master biology to advance human health. 10x Genomics tools include innovative single cell spatial and in-situ technologies designed to enable discoveries across oncology, immunology, neuroscience, and other areas.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: 10x's tools have been cited in more than 6,100 research papers. Serge, thanks so much for joining us on Close to the Edge.
SERGE SAXONOV: Thank you. Really glad to be here.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: I'd like to start with how you got interested in science and genomics, how you made it your field of study and ultimately your career.
SERGE SAXONOV: That's a really interesting question. So actually, it takes me back to college. I was an applied math major and generally had a reasonable facility with programming and with math and statistics and such. And I had a really deep interest in biology, but pretty early kind of found that I wasn't particularly great in a lab with a pipette and-- but at the same time, found that of my skills in programming and in data analysis were actually really useful in some context of what was at that time an emerging field of bioinformatics.
SERGE SAXONOV: I was working in a lab that was kind of transitioning into doing a lot of analysis, the analysis. And I was working on really interesting biological problems. But that of ended up being like a really nice convergence of my deep interest in biology and also where I happen to be-- had some proclivity and some skills. And then kind of-- I guess the second part of that is that I remember this is like late '90s when I was in college and thinking about where the world was going.
SERGE SAXONOV: It was becoming increasingly clear that so much of biology is really going to be about data. There's this emergence of high throughput tools that were coming online, especially with microarrays, but also started to think in terms of sequencing. And you can kind of see this future where biology is going to become more and more of a very data-intensive information science.
SERGE SAXONOV: And it was pretty clear that the field of bioinformatics and computational biology on top of just being very-- not very natural fit for my interests and abilities, was also the thing that I was going to be incredibly powerful and important in the future. And so in college, I decided-- after college, decided to go to grad school. And at that time, weren't a lot of bioinformatics programs available out there, but there was a great one at Stanford.
SERGE SAXONOV: And that's where I went to grad school, and that's where I got my PhD. So that was my start. And certainly, I think a lot of those notions from back then have been kind of proving out as we have seen the project-- the trajectory of life sciences and science in biology more generally.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Serge, you were at-- before 10x, at 23andMe. I believe you were employee number 1.
SERGE SAXONOV: Yeah, yeah. So that was an interesting story too. So coming kind of-- as I was finishing grad school, this was-- and again, being kind of in the middle of Silicon Valley, there was a lot of ideas floating around at that time that we had-- me and my lab mate had as well around kind of the convergence of web advances and technologies and what was happening in genetics, and especially in genetics technology and with this advanced and scaling of microarrays by companies like Affymetrix and Illumina.
SERGE SAXONOV: And so we had this notion. I was like, hey, at some point in the future, people-- it will become possible to tell people about their genetics in a really comprehensive fashion. And the best way to do that would be through this emerging set of Web 2.0 technologies. And so we started kind of sketching out these ideas. And then as I was talking to one of the professors that I was working with about what I was planning to do, which is doing-- kind of essentially starting a company along these lines, he mentioned that, well, actually, I know about this new effort that I was formulating.
SERGE SAXONOV: And I noticed a few people who are about to start a company doing something quite similar. And so I ended up getting connected to Anne Wojcicki and Linda Avey and a couple of other folks that were just kind of putting together some thoughts and funding around forming a company, which became-- ended up being 23andMe and joined forces with them. And there was a really incredible experience. We were the first ones in the world to really start that kind of processing human genomes at scale and trying to extract value to the person-- to synthesize value to the person-- for the person's actual genome.
SERGE SAXONOV: It was really, really exciting. It was a really fun and very rewarding kind of time.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Now, 23andMe is pivoting of late into drug discovery. How much do you think the population genomics platform that you helped build can be mined successfully toward novel drug discovery?
SERGE SAXONOV: Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing about 23andMe, even from the early days-- and that was part of the reason why we joined forces with Anne was that they-- we had this idea that-- to ultimately-- the really promise of the company was in ultimately making use of that data and being able to drive new insights into biology once you aggregate a lot of customers and a lot of genomes and the phenotype information and actually deriving insights, correlations phenotypes to genotypes and using that to drive insights into health and ultimately development of therapeutics.
SERGE SAXONOV: So it may-- from the outside, it appeared as a pivot, but that was always part of the plan for the company. And I give Anne a lot of credit for kind of persevering with that vision and building the company toward that vision. I think the database is very powerful. And there's been increasing over the last decade or so kind of appreciation for how much you can use human genetics to really improve-- both accelerate your drug development but also greatly reduce the odds of successful drugs coming out, again, if you use human genetics as you use a baseline.
SERGE SAXONOV: So I think there's a lot of promise to that approach. And the database is certainly very powerful and unique. In this world, I don't have any special insight. I've been out of the company for a long time now. So I don't have any special insight outside of that. But from first principles, there's a really strong case to be made that there's a powerful potential here.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Now, you joined Ben Hindson and Kevin Ness to co-found 10x back in 2012. How did you come to move on from 23andMe and co-create 10x and why?
SERGE SAXONOV: Yeah, yeah, so there's a little step in between there. So I was-- when I was at 23andMe as we build the company, very much-- we envisioned ourselves as being very much a data science and software company. And we purchased chips from Illumina. And we ran those, and we had another lab that we set up that we outsourced the actual processing of the samples to. But very much saw ourselves as a genetics and bioinformatics and software company.
SERGE SAXONOV: And it was fun. It was awesome. We heard a lot of people that were just like us. It was a great experience. But at the same time, I also felt this itch of trying to actually create better data like tools that could generate better insights because to an extent, when you resign yourself to just data analysis, you're limited to what the existing tools could produce.
SERGE SAXONOV: And oftentimes, we kind of face this issue where the insights that you most like to draw would necessitate the development of new technologies to get at the measurements that you need to understand biology better. And so that of started this edge of for me to actually kind go further upstream and understand the tools that were being built to generate those data. And it just so happened that a close friend of mine, Kevin Ness, started recruiting me into a company that he co-founded.
SERGE SAXONOV: That was a small company at that time called QuantaLife where the guys build this technology for doing droplet digital PCR, essentially the world's most precise DNA counter analyzer. And I ended up joining as a-- to build data applications on top of the platform. And it was a really great experience, very different. Whereas at 23andMe, so many people were kind of like me, came from a similar background, computational background.
SERGE SAXONOV: At QuantaLife when I joined, there wasn't really anyone like me. Everything was-- everyone was a chemist or hardware engineer. Everyone spoke in terms of atoms. I was used to speak in terms of bits and very different language, very different way to think about the world. But at the same time, it was like really invigorating because the kinds of things we could do together in this very multidisciplinary environment were just incredibly powerful.
SERGE SAXONOV: These ideas-- I would come up, and I would talk to Ben. Ben was a co-founder. Ben Hindson was a co-founder at QuantaLife as well, chief science officer there. And I would chat with Ben. And I would ask, hey, I have this idea. Would something like this be possible? And my expectation would be probably not, but just I throw it out there.
SERGE SAXONOV: And he would kind of stare in the distance and like, yeah, you know, yeah. And sometimes, he would have the reverse kind of experience where he would ask me a question. I'd say, yeah, that's actually could be pretty straightforward. And it was this incredibly productive partnership relationship that we had there. And it wasn't just the two of us, but within the company.
SERGE SAXONOV: And so there was a great learning experience for me personally. So now, QuantaLife, we ended up launching our product into the market. And we got acquired shortly thereafter by a larger company, Bio-Rad. And that product that quantitative, Droplet Digital PCR product, ended up being kind of one of the flagships, kind of the jewel in maybe in the virus product portfolio over the last decade.
SERGE SAXONOV: Plus, has done really, really well in the market. It's the leading platform, both I think within Bio-Rad and also more broadly for digital PCR. And sometime after the acquisition, several of us left Bio-Rad. And I remember taking some time off several months after that and just kind of looking around what-- happened to buy a house there, went to see like-- started on a few classes at Stanford, kind of trying to figure out where my mind would take me next.
SERGE SAXONOV: And then at some point, Ben kind of went back to Australia for a while. That's where he's from, and then came back. And then we started getting pings and calls from other people about maybe we should-- about doing things. And so we got together. Literally in a coffee shop, Ben and I and started talking about what are the big problems out there, what does the world need?
SERGE SAXONOV: And it was pretty clear at that time that NGS, Next-Generation Sequencing, was becoming-- was going to become-- you can fast forward the clock and take it as a premise that sequencing capacity is going to become ubiquitous. It wasn't yet back then, but the future was becoming clear. At the same time, it was also clear to us-- and some of that was informed by my experiences at 23andMe. Some of us just kind of looking and going to conferences and seeing how-- what people in the biology talks were kind of talking about and what the genomics people are talking about and how there was this a bit of a Gulf, how some of the-- what outstanding problems would need to be solved and especially around kind of single-cell biology, long-read sequencing, some other elements.
SERGE SAXONOV: And a lot of them had this common theme that could-- that you needed an ability to run many, many reactions in parallel, biological reactions. And if you could combine that with the next-generation sequencing readout, you could really build really powerful kind of fundamental technology that could be applied in many multiple different applications that would be really powerful as we think of next 5, 10 years ahead.
SERGE SAXONOV: And so we sketched out some ideas and incorporated and started-- called up a few investors and got some money. And during that early period, Kevin Ness, who again, recruited me back into QuantaLife, also joined us as a third co-founder. And the key thing here is that from the very beginning, 10x was a very multidisciplinary company. So my background, like I said, is computational biology.
SERGE SAXONOV: Ben is a chemist by training. And Kevin is a hardware engineer, microfluidics expert. And so we had that as the foundation of the company, initially working out of Kevin's garage and raised some seed money, proved-- made some proof of principle experiments. Did a lot of work in that first year iterating on the fundamentals of the technology. Changed their kind of-- changed several times, changed our approach until we converged on what ended up ended up calling GEMs, Gel beads in Emulsions.
SERGE SAXONOV: That was the fundamental technology that ended up being the foundation of our Chromium franchise for the future. So that was kind of the start of 10x. And a lot of it-- a lot of these things happen to be to start around just the human element. For me, a lot of it had to do with just I wanted to work with Ben. Again, it was a lot of fun.
SERGE SAXONOV: It was a very productive kind of relationship. And we wanted to recreate it as we started at 10x. But then as the company-- as we started, as we kind of figured things out and figured out technology elements and started getting more and more ambitious in terms of applications, we realized that there is a really, really massive and important company that we really have an opportunity to build here.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Great. Over to you, Jonathan.
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: Thanks, Alex. I loved hearing that story, Serge. I mean, I did a lot of single-cell RNA sequencing in my graduate days. And I started a little over 13 years ago on it with some microfluidics. I was really janky and needed to have spatially physically separated cells, and you look at them under the microscope. And I remember when 10x came out, I was just like-- my entire graduate work like [INAUDIBLE]..
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: This had only happened at a few years earlier or later. But anyways, so wonderful hearing those stories. But yeah, I wanted to hear about 10X. What are the areas of focus now, and how have these evolved over the past 11 years?
SERGE SAXONOV: Yeah, no, so we certainly have come a long way since those early days when we started in our garage. We ended up shipping our very-- our first product in 2015. And really, 2016 is one with the explosion of single-cell X interest with the Chromium platform that we really-- the commercial trajectory really started taking off. And really, that was the platform, as you were alluding to, really kind of catalyzed the single-cell revolution that's been taking over-- has taken over the world, or at least the world of biology over the last several years.
SERGE SAXONOV: We have always-- and so since that point, we've been scaling that platform many different applications. We're continuously been focused on product innovation. That's kind of the fundamental premise of the company. We see ourselves as very much an R&D engine kind of seeing-- thinking really deeply about what the world of the future needs, what problems need to be addressed. And then working backwards in terms of what technology needs to be built in order to get the world there.
SERGE SAXONOV: That's how we came to converge on that GEM platform, the Chromium platform. And that's how we've thought about all the products we've developed, whether it's been building out more applications on top of the Chromium platform, doing more different types of single-cell experiments, pushing the capabilities forward, whether in terms of numbers of cells or sensitivities, new analytes, multiomics.
SERGE SAXONOV: And we're continuing to do that. So the Chromium franchise is pretty well established now. There's many, many thousands of papers out there, many, many thousands of labs that use it. It's really well known. At the same time, it's still-- in our view, it's still very early in the adoption of this technology because if you think about it, single cell is just-- is the fundamental unit of biology.
SERGE SAXONOV: This is how if you're starting with cells, you really need to be measuring molecules without losing that single-cell context. And so while a lot of genomics researchers and early technology sophisticated people know single cell were very prominent in those markets, it's still very early relative to the rest of life science research. And so we're still-- we're investing very, very aggressively and very intentionally into the Chromium capabilities product development.
SERGE SAXONOV: A lot of the focus is now on top of adding new capabilities, but also making the system kind of more amenable for broader and broader customer base. So in terms of streamlining workflows, improving the data analysis capabilities, having-- allowing people to run this experiment at a lower price per sample. So those are the kinds of investments we're making. And we're also now seeing more and more use of that platform in translational settings, so going from where initially the platform started with very basic discovery research, kind of mapping out atlasing tissues, mapping out developmental biology pathways to now where there's more and more interest in turning these tools in the direction of translational kind of biomarker analysis like doing cohort studies, disease healthy versus healthy controls, and finding those differences.
SERGE SAXONOV: So we see a lot of huge potential to that platform or investing. At the same time, some number of years ago-- and in fact, at the very beginning of the company, we kind of saw that at some point, once people kind of figure out what is happening at the right level of resolution, the single cell, the next natural question is, where is it happening and how are, those cells actually arranged with respect to each other in tissue?
SERGE SAXONOV: And that's a question of spatial analysis. And that's something that we started thinking about pretty intensely quite a few years ago and invested and brought a new-- actually, made a couple of acquisitions and brought a new platform to market in the-- what's called Visium platform. This is now a few years ago. That's been really-- it's been growing quite nicely. And we've been adding more and more capabilities.
SERGE SAXONOV: And there's another major, major capability that's coming to deliver single-cell resolution for the Visium platform. Both Visium and Chromium rely on next-generation sequencing as part of its workflow to analyze the molecules that we either barcode in terms of single cells or spatially on a Visium platform. So a lot of innovation that's happening there. A lot of work, a lot of interest from our customers.
SERGE SAXONOV: And then most recently, we launched our platform-- third platform, Xenium, which is what's called an in-situ analysis. Basically, unlike all genetic analyzers that have existed before, whether it's going back to the days of PCR or microarrays or sequencing where the way you analyze molecules is you extract them from your tissue of interest from your cells and then separately put them onto a separate platform for doing the analysis, what is really different and remarkable and fascinating about the in-situ approach is that you don't do any of that extraction and intermediation.
SERGE SAXONOV: You actually analyze the molecules directly in their native state in tissue. And so you get to measure where those-- those molecules, but you also see precisely where they are with respect to other molecules with respect to other cells speck to tissues. And this is something-- so the technology started at least conceptually emerging back around 2011 in those early days.
SERGE SAXONOV: And as so many things in our field have come out of George [INAUDIBLE] explorations and maybe a few other people. And it felt like science fiction. Only even several years ago, it still felt like science fiction, the ability to be able to do that. And now, with the Xenium platform being others, there's a convergence of technologies have come together to actually make it a reality.
SERGE SAXONOV: And that's something that's been incredibly exciting. We've made a concerted effort within the company to make it a huge priority for us in terms of product development over the last several years and also kind of on the basis of several acquisitions that we made back in 2020. And then over the course of the past year, also in terms of scaling our operations and scaling our commercial infrastructure to really to bring this platform to market.
SERGE SAXONOV: So this has been much of the story of the past year for us, is the launch of the Xenium platform and has gone really well-- commercially has gone really well operationally. And one of the things that's incredibly exciting to us is that this is still-- this is just the very beginning. There's tons and tons of technological headroom on this platform to keep innovating for the next 20 plus years.
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: So you kind of answered this here, but just kind of want to really hone it down in terms of 10x business strategy and strategy for growth. I mean, you spoke of it as a very organic process. Do you think of things as like we're building an instrument, we need to build some consumables, we need to do applications, or is it really this kind of fluid solution-focused thing, or are-- you really have some landmarks where we got to put up a new machine in five years.
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: We got to put-- are you in that of mindset right now?
SERGE SAXONOV: Yeah, it's a-- I mean, it's a good question, right? So there's two elements maybe to the answer. First of all, our primary imperative and the way we drive all decision making in the company is start with the problem first and work backwards. And we try really hard not to get too attached to any particular technology or anything in particular that we might have already have internally and always try to focus on what is the best solution to the problem that we're trying to address, right?
SERGE SAXONOV: And we spent quite a bit of time both internally kind of thinking from first principles, what are those applications, what are those problems that need addressing and also what technologies one would need to develop to address them. But also spend quite a bit of time externally talking both to our customers to really refine those questions and talking to a lot of our customers external people about what technologies exist out there and then kind of including that-- incorporating that into our thinking.
SERGE SAXONOV: I think it is really important. We take a lot of pride in terms of the kind of team that we have built and the capabilities we have internally. But a lot of emphasis on building out capabilities, but also kind of recognize that we don't always have-- we don't have a monopoly in smart people and clever people and ideas out there.
SERGE SAXONOV: And so from that perspective, that's what oftentimes leads to us acquiring companies and ideas and technologies that are out there. That has been the-- the M&A strategy in the past has been very much and going forward is part of our product development strategic process in that fashion. We do have-- as far as a notion of the business model, again, we are not-- I don't like to draw any bright lines like we're going to do this, we're never going to do that.
SERGE SAXONOV: It is very natural in our industry to have a instrument and consumables business model. And there is a certain attractive simplicity to it, in the sense that you provide an instrument that's a source of upfront revenue. And then as customers use that instrument, they pay you money. They buy consumables from you. And if you have a good business, if you have well differentiated, you can charge more for it than it costs you to make it.
SERGE SAXONOV: And so you make money that way. And that has been our approach. And big part of the premise here is innovation, right? The more we invest in innovation, the more differentiated our products are. And the more we can drive the economics to make sure we can invest back in the innovation in that of self-reinforcing flywheel effect. So that's how we think about the world.
SERGE SAXONOV: We definitely think about different generations of technology, and especially when you look at something like Xenium, and we-- when you have a 10 to 20 year type horizon, we definitely see lots of advances that can be made in terms of both new consumables and new capabilities and applications and also ultimately new instruments. Although that said, we're still very much in the early stages of launching this instrument.
SERGE SAXONOV: And we've made it explicitly very much future proof for quite a long time to be able to add more applications and more capabilities on top of it.
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: So I think it'd be great if we brought the conversation back a bit more into the spatial and single-cell stuff and what you guys are really touching in terms of research and how you're influencing our knowledge base and whatnot. I mean, it's incredible that single cell has basically become just a standard tool. And spatial biology kind of has its wave that it's riding right now. And do-- how long do you think the spatial biology bubble can last?
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: Do you think it's a bubble? Do you think it's going to stay single cell? What's your feeling there?
SERGE SAXONOV: Well, I don't think it's a bubble. I think it's a fundamental shift into a new way of doing science. I think single cell in many ways, it is like you said. It's a standard. But back to the point I was making earlier, it's a standard in a substantial but still early market. I think there's lots and lots of people who should be using single cell, who will be using single cell who are still not.
SERGE SAXONOV: So I would say the Chromium franchise is sizable, but it's still early days relative to where it will go. Spatial is even earlier, much earlier. We're just coming out of the gate. But if you just look at both the potential of it from first principles, which I'll touch, on and then also look in the trajectory just out of the gate, we talked about-- we recently had a press release around having 100 shipments of our instruments which is-- which we accomplished in a very short amount of time.
SERGE SAXONOV: It has-- if you look at the trajectory, it's very, very few platforms you can think historically that have had that kind of take off so quickly. You really have to go back to NGS to have a predicate, and maybe NGS is the only predicate for this kind of a system. And there's pretty strong reasons to believe why-- to see why spatial will actually ultimately become bigger than NGS because the way to think about it, one way is-- in terms of the progress of biological hierarchies, what kind of biology are you going to be analyzing?
SERGE SAXONOV: We started with analyzing molecules. What are the molecules in your samples? And that gives you some information, but it's pretty muddled information when you can't put it in the context of individual cells because that's where the actual biology is happening, right? Cells are the primary actors in human biology. And so with the advent of single-cell technologies, you are able to measure molecules in the right context with single cells.
SERGE SAXONOV: So that takes you to the next level of information. But the next level, a set of questions to really understand biology is you need to understand where the cells are and how they form-- they come together to form tissues, so molecule, cells, and tissues. And spatial gives you those all three levels of information to really fully understand the biology. So from that perspective, it's a culmination of what we've been trying to measure biologically across many, many different applications.
SERGE SAXONOV: Technologically, it is also a culmination of several huge trends. One is just genetic analysis like sequencing. The real-- we've been improving sequencing in terms of throughput, in terms of fidelity. But the ultimate goal of being able to sequence molecules to actually be able to sequence and know the context of what they do biologically, and spatial gives you that.
SERGE SAXONOV: So in that sense, it's a culmination of progress that we've been having over the last several decades in sequencing. You can also look at it as the culmination of the progress has been done in histology, imaging, and pathology techniques where we've been for decades kind of looking at stains or immunohistochemistry or FISH-based techniques where you're looking at tissues. You're looking at them under a microscope, But you're only able to see one, maybe a handful of markers at a time.
SERGE SAXONOV: And with spatial, you're essentially taking that need, that approach and scaling it up to where now you can measure thousands-- hundreds of thousands of markers in your tissue. So it's a culmination of that. In fact, it's a merging of those technology trends. And then on top of that, you also are merging-- it's the culmination of the multiomics need and notion where people-- you've had these very splintered markets, even in life science tools space.
SERGE SAXONOV: Some people measuring proteins using a set of tools. You had people measuring nucleotides using a different set of tools, cells, tissues. But with the spatial technologies, you kind of really have a merger of all of these into a single approach that can give you all the information together. And that-- the synthesis of it is actually a much more powerful than the splintered view.
SERGE SAXONOV: So from first principles, you can tell this has the potential to be as big or likely bigger than anything else that has come before. And then when you look at the trajectory right now, there's certainly a lot of buzz. But the buzz is accompanied by real people spending a lot of money and spending real fast on buying these instruments. So we are very, very energized that this is really the future.
SERGE SAXONOV: And it's just-- we're just getting going spatial.
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: Yeah, absolutely. Alex, back over to you.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Thanks, Jonathan. Continuing on spatial, Serge, do you think-- given the potential you see for a lot more growth in spatial, do you think spatial is on track to take over from single cell or is multiomics more of the future technology or competitive challenge?
SERGE SAXONOV: Yeah, it's an interesting question. We got quite a bit. And it's in a way the question we ask internally as well, that interplay between single-cell technologies and spatial technologies, and in fact, within between, our three platforms Chromium, Visium, and Xenium. And the honest answer is well, we know that the three platforms together, those approaches combined have a massive, massive opportunity ahead.
SERGE SAXONOV: This is really the future of biology. You start with tissue, start with cells. You're going to need to preserve single-cell context to-- whether it's for basic research or for ultimately clinical diagnostics, for all kinds of applications. We kind of see that as very clear premise. So we know the world is going there. Now, which technology is-- precisely which of these platforms will find the sweet spot in which applications on what time frame?
SERGE SAXONOV: There's a lot of open questions there. And to some extent, we have to have some intellectual humility in that we don't necessarily know the answer at any given time, how it will precisely shake out. I think there's definitely an overlap in applications. And we're definitely seeing some amount of interest where people are picking up. Where in the past, they might have used single-cell approaches.
SERGE SAXONOV: Now, they're definitely interested in spatial because it gives them that additional view. We're also seeing that in a lot of cases, spatial experiments also lead people to go back and do more single-cell experiments because once they see an interesting finding in the spatial context, they want to go back and take a census of all the cells that exist in that particular tissue using a single-cell approach to give additional context to the experiment.
SERGE SAXONOV: So there's also that interplay. We'll have to-- I mean, to some extent, it's something that we're going to have to see and how it plays out. It's a question of somewhat empirical questions of science and technology. But for us, the core principle is that we don't really mind kind of whichever way things play out.
SERGE SAXONOV: That's the reason we invest in all three platforms. And that's why we've been promoting all three to make sure that ultimately scientists have the best tools for whatever applications and however science turns out to be used.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Now, speaking of multiomic, recently 10x announced the commercial launch of the new Chromium single-cell gene expression flex high-throughput multiomic profiling kit. If you could talk about the kit and how it's designed to work first off.
SERGE SAXONOV: Yeah, so a lot of words there, right? Yeah, I have to admit, sometimes it sounds pretty complex. It is-- the underlying technology does get pretty complex, but ultimately, what that kit allows you to do is actually something that's fairly simple. It allows you to measure gene expression in individual cells across very large scale from thousands to hundreds of thousands of cells to millions of cells in a single experiment.
SERGE SAXONOV: Massive, massive scale, maybe up to be-- we're sure that AGB did an experiment that showed 10 million cells in a single experiment. And also, on top of that, for those cells, you can also measure proteins at very large scale, hundreds of markers per cell at the same time. So it's a very powerful tool. It's also-- flex allows customers to fix their tissues when they first extract them.
SERGE SAXONOV: So you can then process-- batch them and process them, run them at the time of you're choosing. Going back to the point I made earlier about how a lot of what we're also doing with single cell, with the Chromium franchise is make it just more usable, more amenable for more workflows for people. And also, if you have a number of samples now with flex, you can really combine them and batch them.
SERGE SAXONOV: So you can really dramatically lower your cost per sample to just a few hundred dollars when running these experiments. So it really enables a pretty massive increase in throughput, in performance, and in terms of the affordability as well, and bringing in this amazing capability, multiomic capabilities at the same time of being able to measure large, large numbers of proteins together with gene full gene expression.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Now, 10x says that the tool kit allows for simultaneous measurement of RNA and protein from millions of cells at significantly lower cost than other single-cell multiomics tools. First off, what drives that cost? Is it single-cell library prep, or is it more sequencing?
SERGE SAXONOV: So both parts of those are relevant to the cost of the experiment, for sure. Now, one of the things that has been really great for us and for the community at large is that the cost of sequencing has been on this downward curve, right? And in fact, that was one of the premises back when we started the company, imagining the future when sequencing is-- capacity is ubiquitous.
SERGE SAXONOV: We also imagine that the cost of sequencing is going to keep coming down and-- which means that we can-- with us building applications that make use of sequencing where sequencing as part of a workflow, those applications will over time just naturally become more and more affordable and more and more widely used. So certainly, that's been a great trend to see, and it has been helping us.
SERGE SAXONOV: We've also have been making our assays, our single-cell assays more and more efficient, which means that you actually need to use less and less sequencing per cell to glean same amount of data. And so that also reduces the overall cost of the experiment. And then like I mentioned earlier, by the ability to multiplex-- put multiple samples together into a single cell-- into a single single-cell experiment, you can now drive down your cost, the 10x price of that equation down as well.
SERGE SAXONOV: And so now, the economics are split kind of-- again, depending on how you run it, sometimes it's roughly 50/50 between our cost and sequencing cost. Sometimes it's actually-- the sequencing is actually a very small fraction of the overall cost, but it depends on how people are precisely kind of running their experiments. But overall, our imperative is that on both of these axes to keep making experiments more and more affordable and to enable larger and larger scale of these experiments.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: What costs and how does 10x quantify the savings from the tool kit in terms of either dollars or percent or however that is quantified?
SERGE SAXONOV: Yeah, I mean, it used to be-- so going back to flex, for example, it used to be that single cell was-- we started single cell roughly-- the cost of the kit itself and the sequencing was about 50/50. And this is-- back in the days, it was like about $1,300 on both sides of it. Now, with the flex kit in particular, when you multiplex sufficiently, you can get down to the price where that's an order of $400 on a single-cell side and only on order of $50 to $100 in terms of the sequencing side of it.
SERGE SAXONOV: So it is really kind of fundamentally changing the equation of what people can do. And it's still something that's new, I think, to a lot of people's calculus because, again, these capabilities are very, very novel to the world and massively enabling. So we see a lot of customers who are now adopting and envisioning larger and larger scale studies and efforts at larger and larger scales.
SERGE SAXONOV: And so many efforts that are, I think, in terms of now population scale type of single-cell analysis, which really wasn't possible until a few years ago.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: You spoke of sequencing costs going down. What effect have Illumina's, both its new products and its commercial challenges in recent years, had on 10x? With more competition, for example, has Illumina been more competitive in what it might charge?
SERGE SAXONOV: Well, it's hard for me to comment specifically on their commercial tactics. There's definitely more competition now on sequencing than there has been in a while. I think at the same time, Illumina partially driven by competition but also partially by the fundamental premise of their being elasticity in the market, they've released-- they've been releasing new products with NovaSeq, NovaSeq X now, that have been driving the cost per data point down pretty consistently, right?
SERGE SAXONOV: And we've been seeing that in the market. Now, the latest launch, NovaSeq X, is still kind of making its way into the market. It's still early days for them. And so not that many customers have actually-- are at the point where they can achieve the cost savings afforded by these new platforms. But it's certainly a trend that we've been seeing for 20 plus years on this next-generation sequencing curve.
SERGE SAXONOV: And it seems to be continuing. So it's definitely, like I said, great for us. And it benefits us and, I think, the life science research community more broadly as well.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Great. Over to you, Jonathan.
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: So I had a-- I don't know if you'd say it's a theoretical question or whatnot, but what do you think the next major leap in the field is in single cells, beyond jumping maybe just an order of magnitude and cells or reads. Do you think the tech has a resolution to look into DNA variants or protein variants, or what do you really think is the next frontier to break into here?
SERGE SAXONOV: Yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely kind of one axis that's very compelling in terms of measuring more analytes, right? So much of focus has been-- with single cell has been on gene expression. We've also made a lot of progress with epigenetic and open chromatin measurements, which has been very-- that's been a big business for us and has driven a lot of customer success.
SERGE SAXONOV: I definitely think there's a-- it's very compelling to use proteins-- to measure proteins in the single-cell level. And certainly, a lot of our customers have been doing that. I think there's a lot more that can be done there in terms of-- as we think about more along the lines which you were alluding to like post-translational modifications and things of that nature and so kind of really going more deeply into the proteome, the single-cell level.
SERGE SAXONOV: And just like expression, I think proteins should be measured, the level of the fundamental unit of biology, a single cell. So I think there's a lot more work that's going to be done there and is very interesting. DNA is potentially interesting. I mean, the hitch with DNA is that for the most part, it's static. So when you're trying to understand basic biology in most contexts or health and disease, it's not that informative by itself because it doesn't really change.
SERGE SAXONOV: It is compelling in the context of cancer. And so we do see that becoming more interesting in the future, especially as the cost of sequencing comes down because that has been one of the big barriers. If you want to sequence DNA, there's just so much to analyze there. So we do-- we definitely see that as a big trajectory. And I think-- and then you should be thinking in terms of multiomics and actually being able to measure all these analytes simultaneously, right?
SERGE SAXONOV: That's a really, really exciting direction and one that we have definitely enabled in some contexts. So being able to measure epigenetics and expression with our Multiome product has been very, very successful for us. Same thing that I can say with-- as I've been talking about earlier with proteins and gene expression. But kind of putting it all together, so you have all these different analytes and ways of looking at the cell, I think is very, very compelling and certainly the future.
SERGE SAXONOV: And then I would emphasize, again, the notion of going beyond just the most exciting developments for early technology adopters and making this technology more and more broadly adaptable for life science research and clinical community more generally because clearly, single-cell measurements have to be a foundation of how biology is done in the future.
JONATHAN GRINSTEIN: Well, not to get too forward looking right now, but Alex, I know you had a few more questions.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Oh, sure. Thanks, Jonathan. I know 10x has been energetic or aggressive, take your choice of word, in protecting intellectual property rights. It's had court challenges with companies, competitors like Parse and NanoString and Vizgen. How much is this facilitated by the EU European unified patent court now that's in place? And how do you answer their argument that all this does is stifle innovation and limit competition?
SERGE SAXONOV: Well, I mean, our view actually helps innovation in a pretty fundamental way, like we are-- I mean, we've founded the company very much on the premise of innovation and investing innovation. And we see ourselves as an R&D engine ultimately. And when we invest in innovation into new product development, we do-- we're very diligent to making sure that we invest in it, we can also protect it and also protect the customers. If we're going to introduce new product, new technology to the market, we want to make sure that we are-- we have all the intellectual property to enable those products.
SERGE SAXONOV: And we've done-- we've made massive investments to make sure we have that. And then it is now become-- it's an inescapable logic. Once you do that, once you bring awesome products to market, well, you have to protect them. And so that's what we're doing. And that's what allows us to then keep investing into more innovation to bring more technology to market.
SERGE SAXONOV: So that's the fundamental premise of the company. And I think we have full conviction, this is what's also in the best interest of customers. And our track record shows that. We have launched many new breakthrough technologies. And it's always-- for us, it's always a pedal to the metal. We are always investing a lot, and we're always trying to bring new technologies to market as quickly as possible, listening to our customers and keeping their success and their science as our North Star.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Now, given the trajectory of introducing products and commercial progress, looking ahead what milestones commercially can we expect to see from 10x the rest of this year and into 2024?
SERGE SAXONOV: Well, we've talked a lot about our Xenium launch. And that certainly has been a big focus for us this year. And we mentioned-- I think the last bit of news that we shared was the 100 shipments milestone. And we've been scaling our commercial operations, the manufacturing, and R&D to keep driving that. And so we're feeling really good about the trajectory that Xenium has been on. At the same time, we have our two other franchises that we're also investing in Chromium and in Visium.
SERGE SAXONOV: So a lot to do the rest of the year. Looking forward to 2024 as well. We haven't given financial guidance on next year yet, but certainly, we've talked about what we expect for this year. And it's been great to see our progress so far as trajectory. We've had multiple beats and raises so far. And certainly feeling good about the trajectory of the company so far this year and what it means for the future.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Since we didn't mention or bring up a lot about Visium before, I know that a couple of years ago 10x was talking about maybe having a high resolution form called Visium HD. Any word on when we might expect to see that launched?
SERGE SAXONOV: Yeah, so we haven't given any updates on that. We are very-- we've been making great progress internally. We've been showing some data to our customers. It looks-- I mean, the data looks phenomenal. The technology has really come together in a really great way. We haven't given any updates on when it's going to become available, but we're very excited about the capabilities and certainly the customer demand.
SERGE SAXONOV: And I think we-- our goal is to deliver the product that's in line with customers they have come to expect of 10x and the amount of interest and just visceral demand that's out there in the market right now. So very excited about it. Stay tuned, I would say. We haven't shared that updates about when is it actually coming, yeah.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: And on goals, what are your major goals and hopes over the next 5 to 10 years looking longer term?
SERGE SAXONOV: Well, for us, we-- like I said, from the beginning, as we kind of started for-- congealing around this company and the concept of what we're building together, we became clear to us that we have a chance to build a really, really meaningful company. We'd like to think about things from first principles. I'd like to spend my time working on things that I have strong conviction or the most impactful things I could be possibly working on.
SERGE SAXONOV: Ultimately, that's why I'm in biology. That's why I'm in biotech. And we believe strongly that the best way to accelerate life science and accelerate biology is to build technologies, bring new technologies to advance new capabilities. And that's why we do what we do. And so by that logic, we have strong conviction that the kind of work we do here is quite possibly the most meaningful work one can do.
SERGE SAXONOV: And we have an opportunity to build one of the most meaningful and impactful companies in the world. And so that's going to be driven by technology innovation, which is the core of what we do, the foundation of 10X, and also ultimately growth in our markets, our existing markets. And as we look at 5, 10-year horizon, certainly, the applications of our technologies in the health care setting.
SERGE SAXONOV: And that is really what ultimately motivates us, is this ability we're focused on accelerating biology, but ultimately in the service of advancing human health. And I definitely as I think to the next 5-plus years, it's unambiguous in my mind that these technologies will absolutely be used in helping save countless, countless lives. And that's what we're ultimately driving toward.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Great. And just like that, sorry to say our time is drawing to a close. Thank you so much, Serge, for taking the time to be with us today.
SERGE SAXONOV: Thank you. This was a lot of fun. Really appreciate your time.
ALEX PHILIPPIDIS: Great. And thanks to you for joining us on Close to the Edge. We'll have more insightful and more interesting interviews in the weeks and months ahead. For Jonathan Grinstein, I'm Alex Philippidis. Enjoy your day. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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The cadmore media player is a professional video and audio player experience designed to deliver media as well as relevant transcript, segmentation, and metadata. On the screen is a traditional html video player with buttons such as play, pause, forward, captioning, language and play speed selection and more. Adjacent to the video player are generally tabs, one of which shows a scrolling transcript of the video and the other shows any segmentation of the media, sometimes referred to as chapters. At the top of the video is a menu bar containing an Explore button and Tools button. The Explore button allows you to dig deeper into the video by opening up an explore dialog which contains tabs for a visual navigation of the video using thumbnails, an about tab which contains rich metadata about the media, a segments tab which contains further information about the video, and a related tab which contains links to other media related to this media. The tools button opens a menu with options for sharing the media on social media, creating bookmarking links, creating embed codes for your website, generating citations, and more.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts only work while you are in forms mode. By entering forms mode, you will be able to quickly access portions of the media player with single key commands.
Spacebar: Play/Pause Toggle
I: Info Menu,
O: Tools Menu
T: Transcript Tab,
S: Segments Tab
F: Forward 15,
R: Rewind 15
L: Languages,
P: Playspeed
M: Mute Toggle,
V: Volume Bar
N: Video Only Toggle,
B: Full Screen Toggle
C: Captions Toggle
Escape: Closes dialogs and menus / Exits Player
Z: Next Transcript Chapter
X: Previous Transcript Chapter
Q: Next Transcript Paragraph
W: Previous Transcript Paragraph
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
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Embed Size
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You Size - Responsive
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We Size - Responsive
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Picture Overlay Popup
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400 x 225
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512 x 288
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400 x 700
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768 x 1024
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1024 x 512
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1280 x 608
Form Title Cite
No citation provided.
Info
Segments
Related
Thumbnails
Exit Clip Mode
You have requested to see a portion of the video outside of the clip.
Click OK to switch to the full video or click if you would like to stay inside the clip. You can always go back to the clip with Tools and Clip Mode