BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company), a leading global medical technology company, has announced an early access programme for the BD Resolve, single-cell gene expression platform that has the flexibility to capture and analyze hundreds to tens of thousands of individual cells in a broad range of sizes and types.

The platform includes reagents that can analyze both the whole transcriptome and targeted or custom-designed gene-specific panels. When paired with the BD facsmelody flow cytometer for cell sorting and enrichment, unwanted cells can be removed to both improve data accuracy and reduce sequencing costs.

“We are studying the regulation of processes in the kidney, which have customarily been challenging to do with current technologies,” said Dr. Vivek Bhalla, assistant professor of medicine (nephrology) at the Stanford University Medical Center. “Our early work with the BD Resolve platform has allowed us to sequence single cells from multiple samples at the same time, radically saving us on cost and time. The level of precision is also orders of magnitude better. It’s not an overstatement – we are advancing our work far beyond what we could do before.”

Single-cell genomics stands to offer new developments in several fields including immunology, oncology, immune-oncology and developmental biology, but conventional methods for isolating nucleic acids from an individual cell can present technical challenges and be financially limiting. Researchers are often left needing to compromise on performance, workflow simplicity and cell throughput (due to cost of sequencing).

“BD has more than 30 years of experience in single-cell analysis through its cell sorting and enrichment platforms - approaches that are a natural complement for next-generation sequencing,” said Stephen Gunstream, vice president of BD Genomics. “We have created a workflow that can enrich for viable cells of interest, improve cell-type resolution, and significantly reduce extraneous downstream costs due to unnecessary single-cell sequencing.”

The BD Resolve early access programme and introduction at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) conference accompanies the release of the new whole-genome protocol for the BD CLiC  library prep instrument. This new protocol fully automates processes traditionally done manually. With the new protocol, the BD CLiC platform prepares libraries with 1/5th of the input mass and at 20 to 50 percent reduced cost per sample. BD plans full commercial launch of the BD Resolve platform by early fall 2017.