A vaunted technology is in for its first big clinical test

Genome sequencing is a tidy way to figure out what’s going on in a given bodily tissue, but because those tissues are made up of countless cells, what you get is a scientific average that doesn’t account for subtle differences between individual cells.

That’s why single-cell sequencing, which is exactly what it sounds like, has been a tantalizing tool since it was first described in 2009. And now, thanks to a partnership between Johnson & Johnson and the startup Celsius Therapeutics, there’s a sizable clinical trial in the works to determine whether the technology can explain why certain patients respond to treatment.

As STAT’s Kate Sheridan reports, the plan is to use Celsius’s single-cell RNA sequencing method on samples from about 200 patients in a J&J ulcerative colitis trial. The idea is to find biomarkers that will predict whether patients will benefit from J&J’s approved Simponi, and the result “will be an order of magnitude bigger and more ambitious than anything anyone has attempted in this space,” said Tariq Kassum, Celsius’s CEO.

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