Qiagen Acquires Single-Cell Omics Firm Parse Biosciences

QIAGEN (Venlo, Netherlands) has entered into a definitive agreement to fully acquire Parse Biosciences (Seattle, WA, USA), a provider of scalable, instrument-free solutions for single-cell research.

The acquisition will significantly expand QIAGEN’s Sample technologies portfolio into the fast-growing single-cell sequencing market with highly scalable chemistry designed to power research involving millions and billions of cells. Parse’s scalable chemistry is also expected to accelerate growth in the QIAGEN Digital Insights (QDI) bioinformatics business, enabling customers to generate, process, and interpret AI-driven single-cell data more efficiently and at a much greater scale, from the first sample to actionable insights.

Single-cell analysis allows scientists to study the activity of genes in individual cells, revealing the driving mechanisms of health and disease. The global single-cell market is expected to grow from about USD 1.2 billion in 2024 to USD 2.1 billion by 2029, reflecting annual growth of about 10%. This expansion is being driven by AI-based drug discovery as pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies generate large-scale cellular datasets to train predictive models of biology.

Parse is distinctly positioned to capitalize on this trend with Evercode, a proprietary combinatorial barcoding platform. Evercode is highly differentiated by enabling large-scale projects to analyze millions and billions of cells, a capability lacking in other single-cell offerings. Parse’s technologies are supporting breakthroughs by generating the massive datasets required to power a new generation of discovery. The company’s technology is designed to profile more cells in less time, addressing the increasing demand among customers for massive-scale projects, particularly in pharma and academia.

Parse solutions do not require a specialized instrument, allowing for rapid customer adoption and use in any lab and creating a major differentiator in scalability. The company has pioneered high-throughput single-cell analysis, highlighted by the Tahoe-100M dataset – the largest publicly available single-cell dataset to date, comprising more than 100 million single-cell transcriptomes (the complete set of RNA molecules expressed in each cell). Parse’s latest offering is GigaLab, a high-throughput service with a capacity of 2.5 billion cells per year. This service supports multi-million cell projects used in drug and target screens across therapeutic areas such as oncology, immunology, and neurology, and is highly valued by pharmaceutical partners.

Parse’s products are used by over 3,000 labs globally, including all of the top 50 research institutions and top 10 pharma companies. The company holds an exclusive license to 36 granted University of Washington patents on split-pool combinatorial barcoding for all fields, providing broad protection for its proprietary technology.

“The addition of the Parse team to QIAGEN will significantly strengthen our offerings in one of the most dynamic areas of life science,” said Thierry Bernard, CEO of QIAGEN. “Single-cell analysis is the key to understanding health and disease at a mechanistic level. By combining Parse with our Sample technologies portfolio and QDI bioinformatics offering, we can provide researchers with the tools to generate the massive datasets required to build predictive virtual cell models that fuel AI-based drug discovery. We are investing in areas that offer the highest returns and growth potential to create long-term value for QIAGEN and our stakeholders.”

“Parse was founded to make single-cell sequencing accessible to any lab,” said Alex Rosenberg, PhD, CEO and co-founder of Parse Biosciences. “As our team joins QIAGEN, we want to accelerate that mission and extend the reach of our technology to more customers around the world. QIAGEN’s strong commitment to Sample technologies and its global infrastructure make it an ideal partner for our next stage of growth.”

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