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UNITED STATES
SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION
Washington, D.C. 20549
__________________________
FORM 10-K
__________________________
(Mark One)
| | | | | |
| ☒ | ANNUAL REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934 |
For the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020
OR
| | | | | |
| ☐ | TRANSITION REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934 |
For the transition period from to
Commission File Number: 001-39035
__________________________
10x Genomics, Inc.
(Exact Name of Registrant as Specified in Its Charter)
__________________________
| | | | | | | | |
| Delaware | | 45-5614458 |
(State or other jurisdiction of incorporation or organization) | | (I.R.S. Employer Identification No.) |
| 6230 Stoneridge Mall Road | | |
Pleasanton, California | | 94588 |
| (Address of principal executive offices) | | (Zip Code) |
Registrant’s telephone number, including area code: (925) 401-7300
Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| Title of each class | | Trading Symbol | | Name of each exchange on which registered |
| Class A common stock, par value $0.00001 per share | | TXG | | The Nasdaq Stock Market LLC |
Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(g) of the Act: None
__________________________
Indicate by check mark if the registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act. Yes ☐ No ☒
Indicate by check mark if the registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or Section 15(d) of the Act. Yes ☐ No ☒
Indicate by check mark whether the registrant (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days. Yes ☒ No ☐
Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has submitted electronically every Interactive Data File required to be submitted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§ 232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to submit such files). Yes ☒ No ☐
Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, a smaller reporting company, or an emerging growth company. See the definitions of “large accelerated filer,” “accelerated filer,” “smaller reporting company,” and “emerging growth company” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.
| | | | | | | | | | | |
| Large accelerated filer | ☒ | Accelerated filer | ☐ |
| | | |
| Non-accelerated filer | ☐ | Smaller reporting company | ☐ |
| | | |
| | Emerging growth company | ☐ |
If an emerging growth company, indicate by check mark if the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards provided pursuant to Section 13(a) of the Exchange Act. ☐
Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has filed a report on and attestation to its management’s assessment of the effectiveness of its internal control over financial reporting under Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (15 U.S.C. 7262(b)) by the registered public accounting firm that prepared or issued its audit report. Yes ☒ No ☐
Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act). Yes ☐ No ☒
Aggregate market value of registrant's common stock held by non-affiliates of the registrant, based upon the closing price of a share of the registrant's common stock on June 30, 2020 (the last business day of the registrant's most recently completed second quarter) as reported by Nasdaq Global Market on that date was $7.3 billion.
As of January 31, 2021, the registrant had 86,071,237 shares of Class A common stock, $0.00001 par value per share, outstanding and 22,681,465 shares of Class B common stock, $0.00001 par value per share, outstanding.
Portions of the registrant’s Definitive Proxy Statement relating to the registrant’s 2021 Annual Meeting of Shareholders are incorporated by reference into Part III of this Annual Report on Form 10-K where indicated. Such Definitive Proxy Statement will be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission within 120 days after the end of the registrant’s fiscal year ended December 31, 2020.
Table of Contents
10x Genomics, Inc.
SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS
This Annual Report on Form 10-K (this “Annual Report”) contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the “Securities Act”), and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the “Exchange Act”), which are subject to the “safe harbor” created by those sections. All statements, other than statements of historical facts included in this Annual Report, including statements concerning our plans, objectives, goals, beliefs, business strategies, results of operations, financial position and business outlook, future events, business conditions, uncertainties related to the global COVID-19 pandemic and the impact of our and our customers' and suppliers' responses to it, business trends and other information, may be forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements generally can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “expect,” “plan,” “anticipate,” “could,” “intend,” “target,” “project,” “contemplate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “predict,” “potential” or “continue” or the negatives of these terms or variations of them or similar terminology. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in these forward-looking statements are reasonable, we cannot provide any assurance that these expectations will prove to be correct and actual results may vary materially from what is expressed in or indicated by the forward-looking statement. Such statements reflect the current views of our management with respect to our business, results of operations and future financial performance.
You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. We have based the forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report primarily on our current expectations and projections about future events and trends that we believe may affect our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects. The outcome of the events described in these forward-looking statements is subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, including those described in the section titled “Risk Factors” in this Annual Report. Moreover, we operate in a very competitive and rapidly changing environment. New risks and uncertainties emerge from time to time and it is not possible for us to predict all risks and uncertainties that could have an impact on the forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report. We cannot assure you that the results, events and circumstances reflected in the forward-looking statements will be achieved or occur, and actual results, events or circumstances could differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. For a more detailed discussion of the risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ, please refer to the “Risk Factors” in this Annual Report, as such risk factors may be updated from time to time in our periodic filings with the SEC. Our periodic filings are accessible on the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov.
The forward-looking statements made in this Annual Report relate only to events as of the date on which the statements are made. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made in this Annual Report to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this Annual Report or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, we cannot guarantee that the future results, levels of activity, performance and events and circumstances reflected in the forward-looking statements will be achieved or occur and you should not place undue reliance on our forward-looking statements. Our forward-looking statements do not reflect the potential impact of any future acquisitions, mergers, dispositions, joint ventures or investments we may make. Further, as the COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented and continuously evolving, our forward-looking statements may not accurately or fully reflect the potential impact that the COVID-19 pandemic may have on our business, financial condition, results of operations and cash flows.
In addition, statements that “we believe” and similar statements reflect our beliefs and opinions on the relevant subject. These statements are based upon information available to us as of the date of this Annual Report, and while we believe such information forms a reasonable basis for such statements, such information may be limited or incomplete, and our statements should not be read to indicate that we have conducted an exhaustive inquiry into, or review of, all potentially available relevant information. These statements are inherently uncertain and investors are cautioned not to unduly rely upon these statements.
Unless otherwise stated or the context otherwise indicates, references to “we,” “us,” “our,” “the Company,” “10x” and similar references refer to 10x Genomics, Inc. and its subsidiaries.
Channels for Disclosure of Information
Investors and others should note that we may announce material information to the public through filings with the SEC, our website (https://www.10xGenomics.com), press releases, public conference calls, public webcasts and our social media accounts, https://twitter.com/10xGenomics, https://www.facebook.com/10xGenomics and
https://www.linkedin.com/company/10xgenomics). We use these channels to communicate with our customers and the public about the Company, our products, our services and other matters. We encourage our investors, the media and others to review the information disclosed through such channels as such information could be deemed to be material information.
The information on such channels, including on our website and our social media accounts, is not incorporated by reference in this Annual Report and shall not be deemed to be incorporated by reference into any other filing under the Securities Act or the Exchange Act, except as expressly set forth by specific reference in such a filing. Please note that this list of disclosure channels may be updated from time to time.
PART I
Item 1. Business.
Mission
Our mission is to accelerate the mastery of biology to advance human health.
Overview
We are a life science technology company building products to interrogate, understand and master biology. Our integrated solutions include instruments, consumables and software for analyzing biological systems at a resolution and scale that matches the complexity of biology. We have built deep expertise across diverse disciplines including chemistry, biology, hardware and software. Innovations in all of these areas have enabled our rapidly expanding suite of products, which allow our customers to interrogate biological systems at previously inaccessible resolution and scale. Our products have enabled researchers to make fundamental discoveries across multiple areas of biology, including oncology, immunology and neuroscience, and have helped empower the single cell revolution hailed by Science magazine as the 2018 “Breakthrough of the Year”. Our products have won many awards, including among others the technological advancements in single cell multimodal omics hailed by Nature Methods journal as the 2019 “Method of the Year” and the technological advancements in spatially resolved transcriptomics hailed by Nature Methods journal as the 2020 “Method of the Year”. Our Single Cell ATAC solution was named one of the top 10 life sciences innovations of 2019 by The Scientist magazine. Our Single Cell Multiome ATAC + Gene Expression solution and our Visium Spatial Gene Expression solution were named as two of the top 10 life sciences innovations of 2020 by The Scientist magazine. Since launching our first product in mid-2015 through December 31, 2020, we have sold 2,412 instruments to researchers around the world, including all of the top 100 global research institutions as ranked by Nature in 2019 based on publications and all of the top 20 global biopharmaceutical companies by 2019 research and development spend. We believe that this represents the very beginning of our penetration into multiple large markets. We expect that 10x will power a “Century of Biology” in which many of humanity’s most pressing health challenges will be solved by precision diagnostics, targeted therapies and cures to currently intractable diseases.
The “10x” in our name refers to our focus on opportunities with the greatest potential for exponential advances and impact. We believe that the scientific and medical community currently understands only a tiny fraction of the full complexity of biology. The key to advancing human health lies in accelerating this understanding. The human body consists of over 40 trillion cells, each with a genome of 3 billion DNA base pairs and a unique epigenetic program regulating the transcription of tens of thousands of different RNAs, which are then translated into tens of thousands of different proteins. Progress in the life sciences will require the ability to measure biological systems in a much more comprehensive fashion and to experiment on biological systems at fundamental resolutions and massive scales, which are inaccessible with existing technologies. We believe that our technologies overcome these limitations, unlocking fundamental biological insights essential for advancing human health.
Resolution and scale are the imperatives underlying our technologies and products. Our Chromium and Visium product lines provide this resolution and scale along distinct but complementary dimensions of biology. Our Chromium products enable high throughput analysis of individual biological components, such as up to millions of single cells. They use our precisely engineered reagent delivery system to divide a sample into individual components in up to a million or more partitions, enabling large numbers of parallel micro-reactions. In this manner, a large population of cells can be segregated into partitions and analyzed on a cell by cell basis. Our Visium products enable analysis of biological molecules within their spatial context, providing the locations of analytes that give insight into higher order biological structure and function. Our Visium platform uses high density DNA arrays with DNA sequences that encode the physical locations of biological analytes within a sample, such as a tissue section. Our products utilize our sensitive and robust molecular assays to convert biological analytes into detectable signals, enabling researchers to obtain vast amounts of information about diverse biological analytes together with their single cell and spatial context. Finally, we provide highly sophisticated and scalable software for analyzing the raw data researchers generate and presenting it in a form that is readily understood by biologists.
Our product portfolio consists of multiple integrated solutions that include instruments, consumables and software. These solutions guide customers through the workflow from sample preparation to sequencing on third-party sequencers that are commonly available in research settings to subsequent analysis and visualization.
Each of our solutions is designed to interrogate a major class of biological information that is impactful to researchers:
•Our single cell solutions, all of which run on our Chromium instruments, include:
◦Single Cell Gene Expression for measuring gene activity on a cell-by-cell basis;
◦Single Cell Immune Profiling for measuring the activity of immune cells and their targets;
◦Single Cell ATAC for measuring epigenetics, including the physical organization of DNA; and
◦Single Cell Multiome ATAC + Gene Expression introduced in 2020 for measuring the genetic activity and epigenetic programming in the same cells across tens of thousands of cells in a single experiment.
•Our Visium Spatial Gene Expression solution for measuring spatial gene expression patterns across a single tissue sample or gene expression and protein co-detection when combined with Immunofluorescence.
Our Feature Barcode technology, which is currently compatible with our Single Cell Gene Expression and Immune Profiling solutions, allows researchers to simultaneously measure multiple analytes, such as protein and RNA, within the same set of cells or tissues.
Our Targeted Gene Expression solution, which we introduced in 2020, is currently compatible with our Chromium Single Cell Gene Expression, our Chromium Single Cell Immune Profiling and our Visium Spatial Gene Expression Solutions and, allows researchers to target the genes most relevant for their research, validate their hypotheses faster and reduce sequencing costs.
Collectively, our solutions enable researchers to interrogate, understand and master biology at the appropriate resolution and scale.
We believe our solutions, which enable a comprehensive view of biology, target numerous market opportunities across the more than $60 billion global life sciences research tools market. We view much of this total market opportunity as ultimately accessible to us due to our ability to answer a broad diversity of biological questions. Based on the capabilities of our current solutions, and focusing solely on cases where our current solutions offer alternative or complementary approaches to existing tools, we believe, based on our internal estimates, we could access approximately $15 billion of the global life sciences research tools market. We believe we can further drive growth by improving or enabling new uses and applications of existing tools and technologies, as our solutions allow researchers to answer questions that may be impractical or impossible to address using existing tools. We also expect to pursue additional opportunities that will further expand our opportunity, including new potential applications of our single cell, spatial and In Situ technologies in the future.
As of December 31, 2020, we employed a commercial team of 290 employees, many of whom hold Ph.D. degrees, who help drive adoption of our products and support our vision. We prioritize creating a superior user experience from pre-sales to onboarding through the generation of novel publishable discoveries, which drive awareness and adoption of our products. We have a scalable, multi-channel commercial infrastructure including a direct sales force in North America and certain regions of Europe and distribution partners in Asia, certain regions of Europe, Oceania, South America, the Middle East and Africa that drives our customer growth. This is supplemented with an extensive and highly specialized customer service infrastructure with Ph.D.-level specialists. We currently have customers in more than 45 countries.
Our revenue was $298.8 million and $245.9 million for the years ended 2020 and 2019, respectively, representing an annual growth rate of 22%. We generated net losses of $542.7 million and $31.3 million for the years ended 2020 and 2019, respectively.
The complexity of biology
Biology is staggeringly complex. The cell is the basic, fundamental organizational unit of all biological organisms. A human being starts from a single cell, which divides into over 40 trillion cells–such as blood cells, skin cells, muscle cells, bone cells, stem cells and neurons–to create the tissues that enable all necessary functions in the human body. These cells utilize the basic building blocks of DNA, RNA and protein, configured in cell-specific ways.
DNA, the hereditary material of living organisms, is the foundation for a series of biological processes that form the basis for biology and how cells function. DNA is transcribed into messenger RNA (“mRNA”) in a process referred to as transcription or, alternatively, gene expression. Information from the mRNA molecules is then translated into protein in a process called translation. Each gene has the ability to create multiple different mRNAs, resulting in the production of over 100,000 different mRNAs from about 30,000 genes. The complete collection of all of the DNA, mRNA and proteins are called the genome, transcriptome or gene expression profile, and the proteome, respectively. The epigenome includes molecular configurations and chemical DNA modifications that affect how genes are regulated. The genome, epigenome, transcriptome and proteome can be distinct for each of the trillions of cells in the human body and collectively constitute a rich architecture of biology.
Industry direction
The 20th century discovery of DNA, RNA, protein and the basic molecular and cellular mechanisms of their function paved early foundations for humanity to understand our own biology. In the early 2000s, the study of biology shifted from focusing on individual genes and their products to a more global level of characterizing the full collection of DNA, RNA and proteins and how they interact, giving rise to the field of genomics. Genomics is a broad, highly interdisciplinary field that approaches the study of biology at a system-wide level. We believe that genomics-based approaches will encompass much of biology and medical applications in the coming decades.
The Human Genome Project, which was completed in 2003, determined a reference sequence of the three billion nucleotides of the human genome as a composite over several individuals. This reference sequence provided an initial “parts list” of genes, enabling researchers to begin understanding human biology at a global molecular level.
The subsequent two decades of genomic research in many ways have been defined by genome-wide association studies (“GWAS”) and large-scale sequencing of individuals and populations. The goal was to compile all of the genetic variants in human populations and to link those variants to different conditions, traits and diseases. These associations would serve to generate clues and hypotheses that can be tested by subsequent experimentation to understand the detailed biology of each gene and variant.
Both of these efforts have provided substantial value and have been foundational in enabling multiple new research and clinical applications. However, much of the initial promise of the Human Genome Project and subsequent GWAS projects remains unfulfilled. We believe this is ultimately due to the tremendous underlying complexity of biology. The human genome project provided a list of parts and subsequent GWAS projects looked for statistical links between these parts and various diseases and traits. Going forward we need to understand the biological function of each gene and all the molecular and cellular networks they encode. Genomics needs to expand from its focus on the genome and statistical associations to the study of biology more broadly.
This presents an enormous challenge because of the limited capabilities of existing tools for accessing biology at the molecular and cellular level. Some of these limitations are:
•Average, or “bulk,” measurements obscure underlying differences between different biological units, such as individual cells;
•Low throughput prevents requisite sampling of the underlying complexity—for example, when only a few hundred cells can be evaluated at a time;
•Limited number of biological analytes are interrogated, giving a myopic view of only a few biological processes;
•Limited ability for multi-omic interrogation;
•Inefficient use of sample to generate a signal of sufficient strength to analyze the biological molecules of interest; and
•Inadequate bioinformatics and software tools.
We believe technologies that address these limitations will serve large and unmet market needs by providing a better understanding of molecular and cellular function, the origin of disease and how to improve treatment.
Measure the full complexity of biology. A major need is for an in-depth cataloging of biological complexity. This will involve going from a basic biological parts list to a detailed map of exactly how all of these parts are used and interact in both healthy and disease states. Researchers and clinicians need to characterize every cell in the human body, to understand how cell-to-cell variations in genomes, epigenomes, transcriptomes and proteomes give rise to function or dysfunction. They also need to characterize every tissue at a full molecular and cellular level, including how cells are arranged together into spatial patterns that affect function, give rise to disease or impact treatment. For example, in the context of cancer biology, many tumors consist of a heterogeneous population of healthy and cancerous cells, the latter of which may consist of genetically distinct subpopulations that are susceptible to different therapeutics. Furthermore, different spatial patterns of cancer antigens may require different treatment approaches. Without being able to see cells and molecules in their spatial context it is difficult to fully understand tumor resistance and how cells interact with one another within the tumor microenvironment and enable targeted therapies.
Massively parallelize experimentation. Mastering biology will require moving beyond the cataloging of biological complexity and into performing experiments to understand the impact of active changes to biological systems. We believe technologies that enable measurement of massively parallel perturbation and the impact of these perturbations will be important for accelerating biological and medical discovery. For example, an unmet goal of researchers has been to compile all of the genetic variations in human populations and link those variations to different conditions, traits and diseases. Linking these variations to disease requires the analysis of the impact of these variations within different systems, alone and in various combinations. Technologies that enable these variations to be created in arbitrary combinations within various biological contexts and the impact of these combinations measured in a massively parallel fashion will highly accelerate this work. In another example, a longstanding need of researchers has been to predict the interactions between immune cells and the target molecules they can recognize. The human body can make over a trillion different immune cells that are collectively capable of recognizing and mounting a response to nearly any conceivable antigen. We believe that understanding, and ultimately harnessing, this targeting will require technologies that can enable the massively parallel screening of interactions between a set of recognizing immune cells and a set of synthetic antigen target molecules.
We believe technologies that address these needs will redefine biological discovery and power a “Century of Biology” in which many of humanity’s most pressing health challenges will be solved by precision diagnostics, targeted therapies and cures to currently intractable diseases.
Our solutions
We have built and commercialized multiple product lines that allow researchers to interrogate, understand and master biological systems at a resolution and scale commensurate with the complexity of biology. We believe that our products overcome the limitations of existing tools. Our vision, discipline and multidisciplinary approach have allowed us to continuously innovate to develop the platforms, molecular assays and software that underlie our solutions.
Our technological imperatives: resolution and scale
Resolution and Scale are the imperatives that underlie our products and technology. First, our solutions enable understanding biology at the right level of biological resolution, such as at the level of the single cell or at high spatial resolution of tissues and organs. Second, we believe that high resolution tools only become truly powerful when they are built into technologies with tremendous scale. Measuring individual cells, spatial portions of tissues or molecular interactions in small numbers is insufficient. Our products enable measuring and manipulating up to millions of single cells or thousands of tissue sample positions. Thus, our products provide the appropriate levels of both resolution and scale in a manner that allows researchers to easily sift through the complexity to access the underlying biology.
Our platforms, molecular assays and software
Our Chromium platform, Visium platform, molecular assays and software constitute the building blocks of our integrated solutions. These shared building blocks allow us to rapidly build and improve our solutions for studying biology at the appropriate resolution and scale:
Our Chromium platform enables high-throughput analysis of individual biological components. It is a precisely engineered reagent delivery system that divides a sample into individual components in up to a million or more partitions, enabling large numbers of parallel micro-reactions. In this manner, for example, the individual single cells of a large population of cells can be segregated so that each cell resides in its own partition. Each partition then behaves as a micro-scale reaction vessel in which its contents are barcoded with a DNA sequence that specifically identifies those contents as being distinct from the contents of other partitions. Once biological material in each partition is barcoded, they can then be pooled and sequenced together. Finally, the barcode sequences can be used to easily tease apart information originating from different partitions. Our paradigm of partitioning and barcoding gives researchers the ability to measure many discrete biological materials and/or perform many different experiments in parallel, providing tremendous resolution and scale.
We have leveraged our Chromium platform to create a suite of solutions that measure biological analytes at the resolution of the single cell, the most fundamental organizational unit of biology. We believe that, in this sense, all of biology is single cell biology and that our single cell solutions can enhance and sharpen a wide array of scientific work in genetics, developmental biology, molecular biology and cell biology.
Part of our Chromium platform is our Chromium Connect instrument, which we began shipping during the first quarter of 2020. Chromium Connect automates single cell workflows, maximizing lab productivity while reducing user variability to generate consistent, reproducible single cell sequencing results.
Our Visium platform empowers researchers to identify where biological components are located and how they are arranged with respect to each other, otherwise referred to as “spatial analysis.” Our Visium platform uses high density DNA arrays which have DNA barcode sequences that encode the physical location of biological analytes within a sample, such as a tissue section. This solution allows the spatial location of the analytes to be “read out” using sequencing to constitute a visual map of the analytes across the sample. Similar to partitioning, spatial barcoding with large numbers of probes on an array can unlock tremendous insights, providing high resolution genomic information to visualize analytes across biological tissues.
Our molecular assays are used with our Chromium and Visium platforms to provide sensitive and robust biochemistries that convert minute amounts of biological analytes into detectable signals. We have created a wide variety of proprietary assays compatible with our platforms for measuring the genome, epigenome, transcriptome and proteome. For example:
•Our GEM-RT assay is a highly sensitive technique for detecting mRNA molecules that are in low abundance in single cells. Less sensitive methods easily miss low abundance mRNA molecules, resulting in loss of information about the activities of many important genes that are detectable using our assay.
•Our ATAC-seq assay can be used to determine whether particular genes are active or dormant on a system-wide basis and is tremendously useful in studying gene regulation.
•Our Feature Barcode assay allows simultaneous multi-omic interrogation of different classes of biological analytes in a sample. Feature Barcode is highly versatile and can be customized to analyze many different classes of analytes for a wide variety of applications.
•Our Multiome ATAC + Gene Expression assays enables simultaneous multiomic interrogation of transcriptome and epigenome profiles from singe cells for deeper understanding of gene regulation.
•Our Visium Spatial Gene Expression assay measures the spatial positions of biological analytes within tissues at high resolution.
•Our Targeted Gene Expression assay profiles a specific set of transcripts from 10x libraries, and enables researchers to maximize on-target sequencing reads. The targeting solution, with comprehensive and customizable pre-designed gene panels, is compatible with both our GEM-RT and Visium platforms.
Our software is essential to our mission of accelerating the mastery of biology. Since our platforms and molecular assays enable new levels of resolution and scale, they produce entirely new types of data and at much larger scales than previously achievable. To that end, we have developed sophisticated and scalable software that completes our solutions which we provide to researchers generally free of charge. Our analysis software transforms large amounts of raw data into usable results, giving researchers user
friendly tools to dynamically explore these results. As larger and larger amounts of biological data are generated with greater ease, we believe that software tools will become increasingly critical for progress in biology.
As of the first quarter of 2021, we have taken our software offerings a step further and introduced 10x Genomics Cloud Analysis, which will make it even easier for new 10x users to get started, and for our advanced users to scale to larger and more complex experiments. With Cloud Analysis, we are taking the technology that has underpinned and driven our own internal product development for years, and are bringing that to our customers. Optimized for our software products, Cloud Analysis aims to be the easiest-to-use and fastest way to run 10x analysis available. And because we believe analysis is an integral part of our products, we are providing cloud analysis at no additional cost for every sample our customers run.
Since our founding, we have committed to making software engineering and computational biology world-class, core internal competencies. We believe this deep investment distinguishes us from our competition and is worthwhile because it:
•Removes barriers to adoption. With our software, our customers can immediately begin making sense of their experimental data. Without it, they would be forced to develop their own software or wait for the community to do so, slowing down adoption of our products by months or even years;
•Accelerates pull-through. Easy-to-use, efficient software helps our customers analyze their data and complete their experiments and studies faster, enabling them to move on to their next experimental questions sooner;
•Increases scale. Reliable, scalable software helps to remove analysis as a bottleneck as our customers plan larger and more ambitious experimental designs;
•Expands the user base. While early adopters are more likely to have access to bioinformatics expertise, our software enables a broader range of customers to take advantage of our solutions;
•Enables better understanding of our customers’ needs. By supplying analysis software for our customers, we gain much greater insight into their use cases, helping us to design future products that best meet their needs; and
•Enhances and accelerates product development. The software we ship to customers is the same software we use to develop and optimize our platforms and chemistry. This aligns us closely with the needs of our customers and reduces our time-to-market.
The introduction of 10x Genomics Cloud Analysis enhances our ability to execute on, and bring value to our customers along, all of the dimensions enumerated above.
Our product development approach
The success of our products is founded on how we approach product development. Our employees are deeply scientifically oriented, having the relevant scientific expertise embedded not only within research and development, but also within the management team and throughout the company. We are ambitious and focus on fundamentals. We strive to solve big challenges to enable new fundamental biology and to build technological capabilities with potential for exponential impact. We work closely with our customers, many of whom are thought leaders in genomics and medicine, to identify future frontiers and unmet needs. Once we identify the correct opportunities, which we create through both organic development by our in-house teams and targeted acquisitions of technologies that will accelerate our ability to bring new products to researchers, we have the discipline to focus on execution and have a track record of bringing successful products to market.
Multidisciplinary collaboration and technological innovation are central to our product development process. We have built teams with deep expertise across diverse disciplines including chemistry, molecular biology, microfluidics, hardware, computational biology and software engineering. This multidisciplinary expertise forms the basis of our innovation engine, which allows us to introduce new products at a rapid pace as well as continuously launch improved versions of our existing products.
Our solutions enable our customers to focus on biology by providing them with intuitive user interfaces and software. Our products guide customers through the workflow, from preparing samples, to reading sample information on a third-party sequencer, through analyzing and visualizing this information, to make obtaining biological answers as easy as possible. Our workflows operate with existing sequencers that are widely available in research settings.
Our market opportunity
According to industry sources, the worldwide life sciences research tools market totaled more than $60 billion in 2020. Our diverse products and solutions allow biologists to interrogate and understand biological systems at exceptional resolution and
scale. Our focus on enabling a comprehensive view of biology, and not narrowly focusing on a particular analyte such as DNA alone, has produced products which we believe have broad applications and target numerous opportunities across different areas of life sciences research. Because we provide solutions to answer a broad diversity of biological questions, we view much of this total market as ultimately accessible to us.
Areas in which our current solutions offer alternative or complementary approaches to existing tools represented a total opportunity of approximately $15 billion of the more than $60 billion global life sciences research tools market in 2020. This $15 billion opportunity includes flow cytometry, next generation sequencing, laboratory automation, microscopy and sample preparation, among other tools. In many cases, our current solutions offer alternative approaches to existing tools, where the advantages of our solutions can provide more precise answers to existing biological questions than existing tools and technologies. Our tools may also complement, enhance and enable new applications of these technologies. We believe we will compete for research spending within the life science research tools market and capture an increasing share of research budgets as our solutions deliver new capabilities, enable new applications and lead to new discoveries. We also expect to pursue additional opportunities that will further expand our opportunity, including new potential applications of our single cell, spatial and In Situ technologies in the future.
We believe a strong benchmark of the potential adoption of our solutions is the installed base of real-time polymerase chain reaction (“RT-PCR”) units, which is approximately 50,000 units globally. We also believe, based on industry sources, that there are over 15,000 next generation sequencers installed globally. While owners of next-generation sequencing instruments are one of several potential constituencies for buying our solutions, many of our customers do not own a sequencer and, as our installed base has grown, many of our customers have purchased multiple Chromium instruments. We believe that our opportunity for placements of our instruments is meaningfully larger than the installed base of next generation sequencers.
Growth of our opportunity is also driven by a broad and increasing range of applications for our solutions. Our solutions can be used in many different applications, including basic biology, oncology and immuno-oncology, genetic disease, neurological disease, autoimmunity, infectious disease, the human microbiome and many others. In the “Century of Biology,” we believe that the mastery of biology will create advances and benefits for a broad and growing range of industries including broader segments of the healthcare industry and beyond.
Our competitive strengths
We believe our continued growth will be driven by the following competitive strengths:
Our position as a leader in a large and growing market. Since launching our first product in mid-2015 through December 31, 2020, we have sold 2,412 instruments and we serve thousands of researchers globally. We have fostered deep relationships with many key opinion leaders and as of December 31, 2020, our customers included all of the top 100 global research institutions as ranked by Nature in 2019 based on publications and all of the top 20 global biopharmaceutical companies by 2019 research and development spend. Our products are an important part of our customers’ workflow and a significant portion of them utilize more than one of our solutions. Our technologies have become a vital tool for biological research. To date, more than 2,200 peer-reviewed articles have been published based on data generated using our products. Our position as a leader in this market allows us to form deep partnerships with our customers who help us stay on the frontiers of biology, giving us insight on industry needs that inform our product strategy and providing us with a strong competitive advantage.
Our proprietary technologies. Through multiple years of development, acquisition and licensing, we have amassed a core set of technologies that form the foundation of our growing suite of products and solutions. These technologies, including instruments, assays and software, combine a diverse set of disciplines, including chemistry, molecular biology, microfluidics, hardware, computational biology and software engineering. Our technologies underlie features and performance that differentiate our products from the competition. Further, many of these technological elements can be utilized across multiple products, enabling us to leverage our existing infrastructure and investment when building future products, increasing the speed of product development and product performance. Worldwide we own or exclusively license over 330 issued or allowed patents and over 660 pending patent applications as of December 31, 2020. In addition to these owned and exclusively licensed patents and pending patent applications, we also license patents on a non-exclusive and/or territory restricted basis. Our intellectual property portfolio includes important patents in single cell analysis, epigenomics, spatial analysis, in situ analysis, and multi-omics.
Our rigorous product development processes and scalable infrastructure. We have implemented a rigorous and systematic product development process by which our vision can be efficiently translated into commercial products. We develop our products over a set of defined phases delineated by validating multifunctional reviews, which ensure our teams remain focused on quality, efficiency and profitability. This process allows many highly focused teams to execute on separate product development
efforts in parallel while drawing effectively on the resources and capabilities of the company. We have also built extensive technological and operational infrastructure to support the efficient execution of these teams. This infrastructure includes multiple technological investments across a range of areas, including custom barcoded gel bead production, microfluidic chip manufacturing, scalable high-performance computation and automated software productization and testing tools. This infrastructure can be drawn on to develop new products and improved versions of our existing products with high quality at a rapid pace.
Our customer experience and broad commercial reach. We believe in providing our customers with a high-quality experience from start to finish: starting with a collection of validated methods for preparation of samples to be run on our systems and ending with extensive software to aid in analysis and visualization of the data generated. We have also built comprehensive product testing and quality control into our culture and processes to help guarantee the performance of our products in customer hands. As of December 31, 2020, we employed a commercial team of 290 full time employees. This includes an extensive and highly specialized customer service infrastructure with technical specialists covering multiple areas of expertise, including both experimental biology and software. Many members of our sales and customer service teams have a Ph.D. degree in the relevant scientific field. Both our sales and customer service teams help ensure our customers have a positive experience with our products.
Our experienced multidisciplinary team. At 10x, we have built a multidisciplinary team with talent and expertise across a diverse set of areas such as chemistry, molecular biology, microfluidics, hardware, computational biology and software engineering who are committed to identifying and addressing problems at the forefront of biology. We have supplemented our diverse technical experience by assembling an operational team with expertise in manufacturing, legal, sales, marketing, customer service and finance. We believe this confluence of talent from multiple disciplines at 10x allows us to stay ahead of our competitors by identifying highly impactful opportunities and building products and solutions that address these opportunities.
Our growth strategy
Our growth strategy includes the following key elements:
Develop critical enabling technologies. Just as our past success is attributable to our innovative technologies, we believe that our future growth will be driven in large part by our significant continued investment in research and development. We aim to build new platforms, consumables and software that further our goals of interrogating, understanding and mastering biological systems at the needed resolution and scale. We prioritize innovations that meet large unmet market needs, such as measuring novel biological analytes with key functional impact at the single cell or spatial level. We expect that these investments in research and development will allow us to increase our penetration of our accessible markets.
Expand the installed base of our Chromium instruments. Since our commercial launch in mid-2015 through December 31, 2020, we have placed 2,412 instruments and serve thousands of researchers globally. Utilizing our multi-channel sales and distribution infrastructure, we will continue to engage with researchers to increase our installed base of Chromium instruments. We will target new customers in addition to expanding the number of instruments within institutions that have already recognized the significant value of our technology. A portion of our current laboratory customers do not yet own a Chromium instrument, but rather gain access to one of our instruments through an adjacent lab or core facility within the institution. These customers are substantial and easily accessible and therefore represent an opportunity for future instrument sales. We also intend to expand our existing geographic reach, both directly and through distributors.
Strengthen use and adoption of our consumables. Our instruments are designed to be used exclusively with our consumables. This closed system generates recurring revenue from consumables tied to each instrument we sell. We plan to drive wider adoption of our products within the workflows of our existing customers. For example, although most of the biopharmaceutical companies using our products use them at multiple sites, we believe that as our applications are increasingly incorporated into the validation steps in the drug development process, the amount of our consumables used will grow. We have built a dedicated global strategic sales, marketing and business development team to support the adoption cycle by biopharmaceutical companies. The recent introduction of our Chromium Connect instrument is also aimed at driving higher consumable revenue growth, as the fully automated workflow will reduce bottlenecks caused by manual processes. We also plan to demonstrate new applications using our current solutions, including applications making synergistic use of multiple solutions.
Identify the most relevant technologies, create or acquire such technologies and develop them into new products. Over the years, we have developed, acquired and licensed a core set of technologies and associated intellectual property across a broad range of emerging areas within biology and life sciences. The ability to identify these core technologies and capabilities has complemented our internal product development process and enhanced our growing suite of products and solutions. We will
continue to identify and acquire or license technologies and intellectual property that accelerate the development of new features and products or complement our existing features, products and technologies. For instance, we acquired Epinomics, Inc. (“Epinomics”) and Spatial Transcriptomics Holdings AB (“Spatial Transcriptomics”) in 2018, obtaining technology and intellectual property that formed the foundation of our ATAC-seq assay and Visium platform, respectively. We acquired ReadCoor, Inc. ("ReadCoor") and CartaNA AB ("CartaNA") in 2020, obtaining intellectual property, key technology advances, and deep talent and expertise in the emerging In Situ field. Additionally, in January 2021 we acquired Tetramer Shop ApS, a developer and provider of reagents for precise monitoring of antigen-specific T cells in research and development, enabling us to strengthen our efforts in immunology.
Promote our platforms as the standard for single cell, spatial and In Situ analysis. We believe many key opinion leaders have recognized our Chromium platform as the standard for single cell analysis. One of our strategies is to broaden this recognition and promote the breadth of scientific achievements enabled by our products. To date, more than 2,200 peer-reviewed articles have been published using data generated by our portfolio of Chromium solutions. We also highlight successful instances where our Visium platform is used to analyze biological samples within their spatial context. Further research and discoveries will unfold as our solutions are utilized as the global standard and we believe our future third platform, based on In Situ technology, could be impactful on how biological research and clinical assays will be conducted in the future.
Our products and technology
Our products are integrated solutions comprised of instruments, consumables and software. They are built with our expertise in chemistry, molecular biology, microfluidics, hardware, computational biology and software engineering. Our products begin with a researcher’s sample (such as a collection of thousands to millions of cells) and perform high-throughput barcoding to construct libraries that are compatible with standard sequencers. Our proprietary software then provides turn-key analysis pipelines and intuitive visualization tools that allow researchers to easily interpret the biological data from the samples. A summary of our solutions follows below.
Our Chromium Platform
Our Chromium platform, which includes our Chromium Controllers, microfluidic chips and related consumables, enables high-throughput analysis of individual biological components. It is a precisely engineered reagent delivery system that divides a sample into individual components in up to a million or more partitions, enabling large numbers of parallel micro-reactions. The Chromium platform can be used to partition not only single cells, but also other biological materials such as cell nuclei and DNA molecules. The large numbers of partitions generated using our Chromium products can be used for analyzing samples at high resolutions and at large scales. We pair a partitioned sample with our proprietary gel beads bearing barcodes that allow
researchers to uniquely identify the contents of each partition and distinguish them from contents of other partitions. We refer to the partitions that are generated on our Chromium platform as “GEMs,” which stands for Gel beads in EMulsion. We collectively refer to our partitioning and barcoding technologies as our GemCode technology.