Fluent BioSciences Awarded $1.7 Million SBIR Grant to Commercialize PIPseq™, a Breakthrough Platform Technology Enabling Scalable, Sensitive Single-cell Analysis in Any Laboratory

Fluent BioSciences, a biotechnology company focused on making single-cell analysis simple and accessible to every researcher, announced today that it has been awarded a $1.7 Million Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

Fluent BioSciences was established in early 2018 as a spin-out from the laboratory of co-founder Dr. Adam Abate at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF).  Fluent’s breakthrough Pre-templated Instant Partitions (PIPseq™) technology enables near-instantaneous self-assembly of individual cells or molecules into millions of uniform partitions without the need for complex instrumentation or expensive consumables, and is currently in the early access phase of its first product for 3′ Single Cell RNA analysis.

Fluent has now been awarded five NIH grants, in addition to the already successful completion of a $19 million Series A financing round in 2020 led by Illumina Ventures and Samsara BioCapital, two leading firms specializing in early stage life science companies, along with additional investment from Cowin Ventures, VC23 Ventures, and Civilization Ventures.

“Our mission is to accelerate the understanding of biology and disease through accessible, affordable, and scalable single-cell analysis solutions”, stated Sepehr Kiani, co-founder, and CEO of Fluent BioSciences.  “This grant is further validation of our unique technology that finally brings the power of single-cell analysis to every researcher without the burden of high-cost complex instrumentation and one-size fits all consumables.”