Terry Lo of Vizgen on Spatial Genomics

Today spatial biology company, Vizgen, makes their debut on on the program.

When Vizgen CEO Terry Lo was first involved in developing what we now call spatial biology at Perkin Elmer, he admits that he never thought it would have a genomics side to it.

“What was really interesting for me is that for many years as we were building this spatial biology field, we always thought this would be a protein play. We didn’t think that spatial genomics would be feasible as a product. So when I started picking out some of these publications from Xiowei’s laboratory called Merfish—this ability to do this high-plex, single-cell genomics in tissue was really unheard of. That’s what got me excited. This was the first time something could be developed into a real product on the genomics side,” says Terry.

Terry would then follow this first product from Perkin Elmer to Akoya Biosciences where the term “spatial biology” would be coined. Now at Vizgen for two years, Terry says their product, MERSCOPE, is the industry’s best spatial genomics platform, showing gene expression for up to 1,000 genes for a single tissue section.

As spatial biology takes us into the biological frontier, “spatial laboratories” are now popping up around the world, that is labs that are set up specifically for the purpose of mining the benefits of this new technology. Join us today as we delve into the early history of spatial and understand how a newcomer is making waves with their own genomics approach.

Where is Vizgen finding success? What does Terry find to be the sweet spot for multiplexing? And what is this Mouse Brain Map that everyone is talking about?