Spatial biology slide costs stuck at $5-10k for five years, defying Moore's law
anshulkundaje · x · 2026-10-13
- Reposting Xin Chen's argument: processing a single spatial biology slide cost $5-10k five years ago and still costs the same today, with no Moore's law-style cost decline like sequencing (NGS) saw (image: NIH cost-per-genome curve falling from $100M in 2001 to $1k by 2022).
- Spatial biology is critical for disease research: many high-burden diseases are multifactorial, involving complex interactions between cell types in 3D tissues, making it key to drug design.
- More data per slide doesn't replace measuring biological heterogeneity across tissues, patients, and conditions. Unlike NGS, where denser flow cells enabled barcoding more samples, spatial biology is limited by tissue section counts and still requires processing huge numbers of independent samples.
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