Singular Genomics: Creating a new product category - scalable, spatial 'omics.
📅 (Updated May 2024)

My Experience:

I joined Singular Genomics as they were transitioning their "breadboard" machines into Beta G4 prototypes. I wore many hats as we scaled from 70 to 350 people and launched two major platforms over the span of three years. Since this was my second time at a high-growth company, Kaleido being the first, I was prepared! Here are some key lessons if you find yourself flush with cash and needing to execute quickly:

1. 👥 Hire a good team. It sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised how many teams I've observed that hire just to fill headcount. At SG, I helped develop a fairly rigorous, objective hiring roadmap that started with a rubric of interview questions and ended with a creative coding challenge. This resulted in a highly competent team that was fun to work with.
2. 🥷 Automation. Bioinformatics teams often find themselves greatly outnumbered in the landscape of experimentalists and requests from coworkers. I've found the best solution here is to build tools that enable experimentalists to complete established analyses without intervention from a computational biologist. At SG, we've been through several iterations of this tool building, from hacky R Shiny web apps to fully automated backend workflows with slick TypeScript frontends. The point here, automate busy work as quickly as possible.
3. 🛠️ Web forms, unit testing, and CI/CD. Very early on, I helped onboard Nextflow's nf-core coding standards paired with nf-test for many of our main workloads. This gave the team a common starting point and expectation for code hygiene. Pairing that with web form checks greatly diminished user error, saving money and time.
4. 🎉 Have fun. It's easy to get burnt out, especially as a bioinformatician. At SG, we try to do one fun outing a quarter. Below is from a fishing trip in 2021 when our team was relatively small (we've tripled since).

Company Overview:

Below is some content lifted from the SG website.

Singular Genomics is a leading biotechnology company revolutionizing the field of genomic sequencing. Our flagship product, the G4X Spatial Sequencer, stands out for its unparalleled capabilities in high-throughput, in-situ spatial multiomics. This innovative platform combines next-generation sequencing with advanced spatial analysis, allowing simultaneous profiling of RNA, proteins, and fluorescently stained tissue sections (H&E) from tissue samples.

The G4X offers multiple spatial readouts, enabling researchers to conduct detailed and comprehensive multiomic analyses at subcellular resolution. It features a flexible system with four flow cells and 16 lanes, capable of processing large imaging areas up to 40 cm² per run. This high-throughput platform can handle up to 128 FFPE samples per run, delivering rapid results with a streamlined three-day sample-to-discovery workflow.

By integrating these advanced technologies, Singular Genomics' G4X Spatial Sequencer empowers researchers and clinicians to gain deeper insights into complex biological systems, significantly advancing fields such as cancer research, genetic disease diagnostics, and personalized medicine​.