Skip to content

CellCage — Cellanome

Cellanome's CellCage pitches temporal single-cell tracking — repeated transcriptome readouts from the same physical cell over time — addressing the destructive-readout limitation that has dogged single-cell RNA-seq since its inception.

At a glance

  • Vendor / launch date / availability: Cellanome; profiled at AGBT 2026 (Marco Island, Feb 22–25); roadmap (not commercially shipping at AGBT) per GEN AGBT 2026 recap.
  • Chemistry / modality: Temporal single-cell tracking — transcriptome measurement over time per cell rather than the destructive end-point single-readout of conventional scRNA-seq per GEN AGBT 2026 recap.
  • Throughput (PR): TBD — cells per run, timepoints per cell, and run-time figures not enumerated in public AGBT 2026 coverage.
  • Read length: n/a (CellCage is a single-cell sample-handling / readout platform; downstream sequencing chemistry not specified in public coverage).
  • Accuracy (PR): TBD — no per-cell capture efficiency, transcript-detection sensitivity, or temporal-resolution figures in public AGBT coverage.
  • List price / cost-per-sample: TBD — roadmap-status platform, no pricing surfaced.

Source caveat: AGBT 2026 public coverage of Cellanome is limited to the GEN recap inclusion and the program-notes line noting Gary Schroth (formerly Illumina) as CSO. Most quantitative fields are flagged TBD; (vendor PR — no independent benchmark) applies to all spec claims.

What's new vs prior generation

The defining limitation of single-cell RNA-seq is that the readout destroys the cell — every dataset is a snapshot of a different population, and "temporal" inference relies on RNA-velocity modeling or pseudotime reconstruction rather than direct measurement. CellCage's pitch inverts that constraint: track the same cell across multiple timepoints, enabling direct trajectory measurement for differentiation, drug-response kinetics, and clonal-fate mapping. This places CellCage adjacent to (but mechanistically distinct from) lineage-barcoding methods like Watermelon, LARRY, and barbieQ that infer trajectories via clonal barcoding rather than direct repeated measurement.

Headline benchmarks

TBD — no published demonstration cohort, no third-party comparison, no methods paper indexed at time of writing.

Reception / competitive context

CellCage entered AGBT 2026 as a category-defining roadmap announcement rather than a head-to-head competitor to a specific shipping product. The Gary Schroth CSO appointment signals serious chemistry pedigree (Schroth led Illumina's library-prep R&D for years). Conceptually adjacent platforms and methods at the same meeting / cross-conference:

  • Clonal-tracking methods at EuroBioC / GBCC — barbieQ and similar clone-tracking statistical frameworks are conceptually adjacent (both reconstruct cell-level trajectories, but barbieQ uses barcoded clonal inference; CellCage measures the same cell directly).
  • AACR axis — drug resistance / lineage tracing: CellCage's natural AACR application is direct measurement of drug-response trajectories in tumor cells (kinetics of resistance emergence per cell), competing with Watermelon and LARRY barcoding approaches that dominate current AACR drug-resistance posters.
  • Conceptually adjacent (clonal tracking): GBCC / EuroBioC barbieQ — clone-tracking statistical framework, complementary rather than directly competitive.
  • Single-cell platforms at AGBT 2026: Waters Rhapsody refresh, Codetta Concerto (different angle — multimodal bulk rather than temporal single-cell).
  • AACR axis — drug-resistance / lineage tracing: CellCage is too early-stage for AACR 2026 data posters; expect first methods abstracts at AACR 2027 / AGBT 2027 if the platform ships on schedule.
  • Bioconductor downstream: temporal single-cell data lands naturally in SingleCellExperiment with custom time-dimension annotations; trajectory tools (slingshot, tradeSeq) become direct measurement tools rather than inference tools when fed CellCage data.

Sources

Open items: locate a primary Cellanome press release or Schroth public talk enumerating CellCage's per-cell timepoint count, throughput, and shipping window. Backfill spec table when a primary source is reachable.