BioCentury
ARTICLE | Strategy

Singles club

Single-cell research thrives on collective resources

October 22, 2015 7:00 AM UTC

Single-cell analysis is fast becoming the new buzzword in diagnostics and cell-based therapies, as it forms the basis of a wave of technologies aiming to support personalized medicine, but the problem is how to reliably extract actionable conclusions from large sets of noisy data. Last month, Fluidigm Corp. opened a single-cell research facility in Australia - the latest in a crop of centers being set up to help researchers share data, establish best practices and gain access to cutting-edge methods.

The single-cell approach involves measuring DNA, RNA or protein signals from hundreds of thousands of individual cells, and is a departure from standard methods that look at data from population averages of cells or tissues. ...