Menarini Silicon Biosystems

Silicon Biosystems was founded in Bologna as a spin-out from the University of Bologna to commercialise DEPArray, a dielectrophoresis-based instrument that isolates individual cells from a mixed sample so they can be sequenced or analysed one at a time. The Menarini group acquired it in 2013 and in 2017 bought the CellSearch circulating tumour cell system from Janssen Diagnostics, uniting enumeration of circulating tumour cells with single-cell recovery. The company sells the instruments and reagents to hospital and research laboratories and runs a service laboratory in the United States; its main customers are pharmaceutical trials that use circulating tumour cell counts and single-cell analysis as biomarkers.