ReadCoor, a company reinventing omics and pathology with its panomic spatial sequencing platform, and WAVE Life Sciences, a genetic medicines company focused on developing targeted therapies for patients impacted by rare diseases, announced the initiation of a research collaboration to develop a registry of brain cell network maps and advance WAVE’s nucleic acid chemistry for targeted delivery to the brain.

Over the next two years, ReadCoor and WAVE have agreed to develop a cell map of the mouse brain and to leverage it to characterize stereopure nucleic acid candidates in specific regions, cell types, and subcellular compartments of the brain. This agreement marks the first major industry collaboration for ReadCoor and increases the number of platform collaborations aimed at unlocking next generation targets for WAVE.

ReadCoor’s proprietary FISSEQ (Florescent In-Situ Sequencing) platform is designed to provide critical spatial data by combining next generation sequencing and three-dimensional imaging. This unique in-situ sequencing technique is expected to provide meaningful insight of disease state, treatment effects, and outcomes at the molecular level. WAVE’s drug development platform is designed to enable the development of stereopure nucleic acid therapeutics, with optimized efficacy, stability, safety, and specificity. By leveraging ReadCoor’s technology, WAVE expects to increase its ability to identify transcriptome changes at the regional, cellular, and subcellular levels within the central nervous system and to expand its existing discovery capabilities for next generation candidate development.

Shawn Marcell, CEO of ReadCoor said, “WAVE’s unique ability to rationally design nucleic acid therapeutic candidates and ReadCoor’s distinctive ability to deliver in-situ spatial data in cells are highly complementary. We are excited to expand the use of FISSEQ in our first industry collaboration with WAVE.”

“At WAVE, one of our founding principles is that you cannot truly optimize nucleic acid therapeutics using mixtures of molecules. We believe the same is true when targeting biology using mixtures of cell types,” said Paul B. Bolno, M.D., president and CEO of WAVE. “We believe the ReadCoor platform will help enable significantly improved resolution of various neurons, astrocytes and glial cells, thereby assisting WAVE to efficiently select the optimal therapeutic modality for WAVE’s next generation of pipeline candidates.”