The promise of precision medicine is to deliver highly targeted treatment to every single diseased cell. The conventional one-size-fits-all approach of medical treatments isn't working for many patients who need help. To move precision medicine forward, researchers and clinicians need to look at the origins of disease, the single cell, in new meaningful ways.
Because most diseases are not caused by just one mutation, understanding genetic variability, including mutation co-occurrence at the single-cell level, is vitally important for clinical researchers. This level of resolution is missed with existing bulk sequencing which can result in failed clinical trials, high costs, and poor patient outcomes. To impact precision drug discovery, development, and delivery, insight into the mutational differences within and among every single cell is needed.
The conventional technology for measuring cellular mutations and heterogeneity for complex disease is bulk sequencing based on averages. A problem with using averages is that the underlying genetic diversity is missed across cell populations. Understanding this diversity is important for patient stratification, therapy selection and disease monitoring. Moving beyond averages helps deliver on the promise of precision medicine.
Therefore, there is a need for method, system and apparatus to provide high-throughput, single-cell DNA sequencing.