# A Uniquely Scalable Approach to Sequence Tens of Millions of Single Cells Without Compromising Performance

> **NIH NIH R43** · SANSIMEON, INC · 2023 · $275,628

## Abstract

Immunotherapies (including CAR-T cell therapies) are wonder drugs when they work, but the
response rates of today’s immunotherapies are only 15-20% and therapy costs remain
prohibitively high for mass adoption. Recent advances in single cell sequencing make it a critical
tool for the development of next generation cell therapies through high impact applications such
as TCR immune profiling and pooled CRISPR screening. Unlocking the value of these
applications requires interrogation of >10 million cells per experiment. Expiration of Illumina’s core
IP in 2023 re-ignited competition in US & EU markets and re-accelerated the drop in DNA
sequencing costs to make sequencing of ~10 million cells affordable in 1-2 years, but existing
methods for single cell barcoding do not support throughput beyond 1 million cells per experiment.
Proposed alternatives are scalable, but trade-offs in performance and ease-of-use make them
unsuitable for translational research. Sansimeon’s approach uniquely enables scaled single cell
sequencing with throughput to 100M cells, while retaining high ease-of-use and necessary cell
capture efficiency for high-throughput applications in translational research. The platform
overcomes throughput limitations common to other drop-seq approaches by leveraging rapid
deterministic pairing of single cells with single beads in a microchannel prior to emulsification,
without the need for multi-step labeling workflows such as cell-hashing or combinatorial indexing.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10700398
- **Project number:** 1R43GM149003-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** SANSIMEON, INC
- **Principal Investigator:** Philipp Stefan Spuhler
- **Activity code:** R43 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2023
- **Award amount:** $275,628
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2023-08-01 → 2024-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10700398

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10700398, A Uniquely Scalable Approach to Sequence Tens of Millions of Single Cells Without Compromising Performance (1R43GM149003-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10700398. Licensed CC0.

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