Akoya Biosciences and Enable Medicine Launch the Largest Commercially Available Single-Cell Spatial Proteomics Atlas
Rhea-AI Summary
Akoya Biosciences (NASDAQ: AKYA) and Enable Medicine have announced a collaboration to launch the largest commercially available single-cell spatial proteomics atlas. The Enable Pan-Cancer Atlas, built using Akoya's PhenoCycler®-Fusion platform and PhenoCode™ Discovery IO60 panel, contains over 100 million single cells from 8,500+ samples across 15+ cancer types.
The atlas features up to 60 protein biomarkers, H&E images, spatial transcriptomics measurements, and comprehensive clinical metadata. This curated and standardized dataset is commercially licensable, aimed at accelerating biomarker discovery and drug development. The platform allows users to filter and analyze data by biomarker expression, tissue type, and clinical metadata.
The atlas will be showcased at the AACR Annual Meeting 2025 at Akoya's Booth #3045, with a live demonstration scheduled for April 27.
Positive
- Launch of industry's largest commercial single-cell spatial proteomics dataset
- Commercial licensing opportunities for biopharma research and AI development
- Integration capabilities with existing PhenoCycler-Fusion customer data
- Comprehensive coverage across multiple cancer types enhancing research potential
Negative
- None.
Insights
Akoya's partnership creates massive proteomics atlas enhancing cancer research capabilities, strengthening their spatial biology platform's value proposition.
The collaboration between Akoya Biosciences and Enable Medicine represents a significant advancement in spatial proteomics technology. The newly launched Pan-Cancer Atlas contains over 100 million single cells across 8,500+ samples from 15+ cancer types, offering unprecedented scale in commercially available spatial proteomics data.
The technical specifications are impressive: up to 60 protein biomarkers per sample, complemented by H&E images, spatial transcriptomics measurements, and comprehensive clinical metadata. This multi-modal approach provides researchers with contextual insights impossible with traditional single-cell methods.
What differentiates this atlas is its foundation on Akoya's PhenoCycler-Fusion platform and PhenoCode Discovery IO60 panel, which enables high-throughput, high-plex protein measurements while preserving spatial context. This technological combination solves a critical challenge in cancer research - understanding how cellular phenotypes and interactions within the tumor microenvironment influence disease progression and treatment response.
The pre-annotated, standardized nature of this dataset significantly reduces the computational burden typically associated with spatial biology data analysis. For researchers, this means faster hypothesis generation and validation, potentially accelerating the path from discovery to clinical application.
Partnership strengthens Akoya's market position by adding valuable data services to their hardware platform, creating potential new revenue opportunities.
This partnership strategically positions Akoya beyond hardware sales into the high-value data services market. By collaborating with Enable Medicine, Akoya enhances their PhenoCycler-Fusion platform's commercial appeal, creating a powerful incentive for both new and existing customers.
The business model appears focused on licensing the atlas data, potentially creating a complementary revenue stream alongside Akoya's instrument and reagent sales. For biopharma customers, the value proposition is compelling: immediate access to standardized spatial proteomics data that can accelerate biomarker discovery and drug development programs.
This move aligns with the industry trend toward integrated hardware-software-data offerings. By connecting customers' experimental data with the broader Enable Atlas, Akoya creates network effects that could increase platform adoption and user engagement.
The timing of this announcement ahead of the AACR Annual Meeting indicates a strategic marketing approach, targeting cancer researchers when scientific visibility is highest. The live demonstrations planned at their booth suggest confidence in the product's ability to generate customer interest.
From a competitive standpoint, this data resource differentiates Akoya in the growing spatial biology market, where technology platforms are increasingly competing on ecosystem value rather than hardware specifications alone.
>8,500 samples and 100 million cells of high resolution and fully annotated spatial proteomics data available
MARLBOROUGH, Mass., April 24, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Akoya Biosciences, Inc. (Nasdaq: AKYA), The Spatial Biology Company®, and Enable Medicine, a real-world data company providing AI-ready patient, cellular and molecular data, today announced a groundbreaking collaboration to deliver the largest commercially available single-cell spatial proteomics atlas to the research and clinical community.
Enable Medicine’s Pan-Cancer Atlas is a unique multi-modal dataset built using Akoya’s PhenoCycler®-Fusion (PCF) platform and includes the PhenoCode™ Discovery IO60 panel as its foundational data. The Enable Atlas comprises over 100 million single cells, spanning 8,500+ samples and 15+ cancer types, with rich cellular features, including up to 60 protein biomarkers, accompanying H&E images and spatial transcriptomics measurements, and comprehensive clinical metadata.
The Enable Atlas is curated, standardized, and commercially licensable. It provides immediate value to biopharma researchers and AI model developers seeking to accelerate biomarker discovery, drug development, and translational insights. It is a special mechanism for new and existing PhenoCycler-Fusion customers to further power their experiments by integrating their data with the Enable Atlas.
“The Enable Atlas is a catalytic resource for our customers,” said Niro Ramachandran, Chief Business Officer at Akoya Biosciences. “Biopharma customers now have the potential to generate new hypotheses from existing data, increase the statistical power of their studies, and identify novel cellular phenotypes at a scale never before possible.”
Built for scale. Designed for discovery.
The Enable Atlas’s spatial proteomics layer was generated using Akoya’s PhenoCycler-Fusion, the industry’s fastest and most scalable spatial biology platform, and included the ultrahigh-plex IO60 panel, capturing broad biological diversity across tissue types.
Enable Medicine’s software platform hosts the dataset and makes it easily explorable, allowing users to filter and subset by biomarker expression, tissue type, clinical metadata, and more. These analytical and annotation capabilities make the Atlas a powerful tool for biomarker discovery, comparative analysis, and statistical validation in discovery and translational research.
“Our strategy to map disease and provide insightful biological data requires technologies that scale. PhenoCycler-Fusion and IO60 made this possible — this combination uniquely powered the generation of our large, high-resolution, and biologically rich proteomic dataset,” said Aaron Mayer, Chief Scientific Officer at Enable Medicine. “This level of multiplexing, throughput, and consistency was essential to create a resource that’s not only comprehensive but immediately impactful in therapeutic, diagnostic, and scientific research settings.”
Key features of the Enable Pan-Cancer Atlas:
- Unmatched scale and depth: Over 100 million spatially profiled single cells
- High-dimensional data: up to 60 protein markers with spatial context, H&E, and spatial transcriptomics data on select samples
- Diverse sample coverage: 8,500+ samples across 15+ cancer indications and normal tissues
- Rich metadata: Clinical context to power translational insights
- Immediate usability: Licensable and structured for downstream analysis
Meet Us at AACR 2025
The Spatial Atlas will be showcased at the upcoming American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting, offering attendees a first look at this new spatial proteomics resource.
Location: Akoya Booth #3045 | April 27 | 4:30–5:00 PM
A live demonstration of the Atlas will be available during the scheduled session. Members of the Akoya and Enable Medicine teams will be on-site to discuss how the dataset can be applied to translational research, biomarker discovery, and drug development programs. For more information, visit https://sb.akoyabio.com/aacr2025.
About Akoya Biosciences
As The Spatial Biology Company®, Akoya Biosciences’ mission is to bring context to the world of biology and human health through the power of spatial phenotyping. The Company offers comprehensive single-cell imaging solutions that allow researchers to phenotype cells with spatial context and visualize how they organize and interact to influence disease progression and response to therapy. Akoya offers a full continuum of spatial phenotyping solutions to serve the diverse needs of researchers across discovery, translational and clinical research: PhenoCode™ Panels and PhenoCycler®, PhenoImager® Fusion and PhenoImager HT Instruments. To learn more about Akoya, visit www.akoyabio.com.
About Enable Medicine
Enable Medicine is a real-world data company unlocking new insights into human disease via integrated patient, cellular and molecular information. The company offers AI-ready biological data, data management tools and data analysis services to fuel the development of large multimodal foundational models, diagnostics and drug development. Enable Medicine’s data solutions support science spanning the discovery of novel therapeutic targets to assist with better clinical trial design. To learn more about Enable, visit www.enablemedicine.com.
Akoya Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements that are based on Akoya management’s beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to Akoya management. All statements contained in this release other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements, including statements concerning the capabilities and potential of Akoya’s products and services, its collaboration with Enable Medicine, its future performance and its plans and objectives for future operations.
In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by the words “may,” “will,” “could,” “would,” “should,” “expect,” “intend,” “plan,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “predict,” “project,” “potential,” “continue,” “ongoing” or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology, although not all forward-looking statements contain these words. These statements involve risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements to be materially different from the information expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. These risks, uncertainties and other factors are described under "Risk Factors," "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" and elsewhere in the documents Akoya files with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time. The reader is cautioned that forward-looking statements are based on a combination of facts and factors currently known by Akoya and Akoya’s projections of the future, about which Akoya cannot be certain. As a result, the forward-looking statements may not prove to be accurate. The forward-looking statements in this press release represent Akoya’s views as of the date hereof. Akoya undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements for any reason, except as required by law.
Investor Contact:
Priyam Shah
Media Contact:
Ritu Mihani
Enable Medicine Business Development Contact:
Jess Werlin
FAQ
What is the scale of Akoya Biosciences' (AKYA) new Pan-Cancer Atlas collaboration?
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