A company at the center of one of the hottest technologies in life science research, and one of the most vicious patent battles among makers of lab instruments, has closed a chapter.
NanoString Technologies, a Seattle-based company that makes machines for parsing how RNA and proteins vary across cells — an approach known as spatial biology — will be acquired for $392.6 million by the scientific instrument company Bruker. It filed for bankruptcy in February.
The terms of the sale, announced Tuesday evening, are 78% higher than what the investment firm Patient Square Capital previously offered NanoString in March, and more than 50 times higher than the company’s roughly $7 million market cap. Yet they’re a far cry from NanoString’s nearly $3.7 billion value three years ago.
NanoString was founded in 2003 and has long sold an instrument called nCounter for detecting and measuring RNA, DNA or proteins from a sample. But over the past five years, it has pivoted to the emerging field of spatial biology, which allows scientists to study how biomolecules vary from cell to cell across a slice of tissue.
The techniques are revealing the makeup of life in stunning detail, yielding the highest-resolution maps of the brain yet and uncovering new clues about the interplay between cancer and the immune system. Scientists are hopeful that the methods could lead to a bounty of fresh ideas for drug developers.
NanoString is one of a handful of companies that sell instruments for measuring gene expression across a tissue, a subset of spatial biology known as spatial transcriptomics. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this year after losing a patent fight with 10x Genomics over one of its spatial biology instruments, called GeoMx.
The companies are the biggest providers of spatial biology equipment. Their machines costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and each experiment on a single slice of tissue costs thousands of dollars more.
Many scientists in the field have worried that NanoString’s bankruptcy would stymie research in labs that have relied on the company’s machines and have limited budgets to switch to competing models. 10x has also sued smaller spatial biology companies Curio Bioscience and Vizgen, and some independent researchers have accused 10x of monopolistic behavior, a claim echoed in NanoString and Vizgen’s countersuits and vehemently denied by 10x.
Brad GrayNanoString CEO Brad Gray told Endpoints News in an interview earlier this month that the company’s existing debt and its string of three legal losses made it impossible for the company to raise additional capital needed to cover the $31 million in damages that the US courts said it owed 10x. At that time, he said that Patient Square Capital would take NanoString private and continue fighting its lingering legal battles.
The company plans to appeal the jury decision on GeoMx, its older spatial biology instrument. The lawsuit over its newer and higher-resolution instrument CosMx is still ongoing.
In NanoString’s press release about Bruker’s winning bid for the company, it indicated that it would allow its customers to continue buying its products and that Bruker would take on “certain liabilities.”
Gray said in an email that he expects Bruker “to continue offering all of our products” and “to offer positions to substantially all of our employees.” Bruker did not respond to a request for additional comment at the time of publication.