Life science company 10x Genomics has launched Atera, a biology platform designed to deliver whole-transcriptome spatial analysis with single-cell sensitivity.
“We rethought the system from the ground up, optimising each component across chemistry, hardware and software to enable what was previously impossible in spatial analysis,” said CTO, CSO and founding scientist Michael Schnall-Levin. “The result is a platform that delivers whole-transcriptome spatial data with single-cell sensitivity at scale. The Atera platform will substantially expand the scope of questions that can be addressed in spatial biology.”
Traditionally, gene expression, cellular states and spatial organisation have been studied using separate tools at limited scale. This has prevented researchers from obtaining a complete view of how biological systems function and how disease emerges and evolves. Additionally, researchers often had to make the choice to prioritise scale, sensitivity or gene selection to accommodate the constraints of spatial technologies.
“Biology is inherently complex, and as much progress as we have made, we still understand only a fraction of how it works,” said 10x Genomics cofounder and CEO Serge Saxonov. “Progress in medicine depends on confronting that complexity directly, which requires measuring biology as it actually functions: systems of individual cells, expressing specific transcripts, in precise locations within tissue.”
Atera is engineered to enable the complete measurement of biology in its native context at single-cell resolution at scale. The technology supports large-scale whole transcriptome spatial studies across both fresh-frozen and FFPE tissue.
Atera was showcased at AACR 2026, along with its data from research institutions such as the June Lab at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania and German Cancer Research Institute.
