Genome encodes functional and dysfunctional information not only in its main chapters of linear sequences and primary chemical modifications such as methylations, also in its dynamic multi-dimensional structures, organizations, functional derivatives in forms of aberrant orders, binding and interactions, loops and folds, locations and shapes.
For twenty years, genomics has progressed to be good at answering one question: " what does this person's inherited genome say? "
That question has a simpler structure. One genome, shared by every cell, in theory. Averaging across millions of cells is the correct method. Deep short- and long-read sequencing plus mapping answers it with remarkable approximation and falling cost, and the informatics built on top of it is some of the best engineering in modern biology.
Somatic disease is a different question.
A tumor is not one genome. It is thousands of genomes, diverging in real time — aneuploid, poly-aneuploid, restructured by chromothripsis and chromoplexy, carrying extrachromosomal DNA that segregates without a centromere and varies from zero to hundreds of copies between neighboring cells. Aneuploidy is a hallmark of cancer, present in up to 90% of solid tumors. Poly-aneuploid cancer cells drive therapy resistance and progression. ecDNA is reported in a large fraction of the most aggressive cancers, including glioblastoma and small cell lung cancer. In that setting, averaging stops being compression and becomes destruction.
In germline genomics, the consensus is the answer. In somatic genomics, the consensus is a genome that no cell actually has.
This is not a failure of sequencing. It's a mismatch between an input and a question. Standard preparation — mixing, sonication, fragmentation, stripping of structural context — dissolves exactly the information that defines a somatic genome: which pieces were attached to which, what was circular, what belonged to the same strand, compartment, nucleus, cell. No amount of depth recovers it, because the information was gone before the instrument saw the sample.
Dimension Genomics builds nanofluidic technology that physically organizes, enriches and isolates genomic material at the level of the single aberrant chromosome and its derivatives.
Instead of grinding a heterogeneous specimen into a pool and asking software to reconstruct what was there, we separate the objects first — discrete normal and aberrant chromosomes, micronuclei, extrachromosomal DNA — and sequence them as the distinct entities they are. The result is a sequencing library with a property that bulk preparation cannot provide: the molecules in it came from the same object.
Shown here: a poly-aneuploid cancer genome carrying more than 67 chromosomes, plus chromosomal derivatives and ecDNA, physically organized and displayed on the Dimension Chip for locus- and sequence-agnostic analysis and isolation. The non-inferred ground truth.
This approach reveals the diluted or lost individual deleterious molecular deviations from the base germline signals, with highest signal clarity in somatic patient samples. These critical signals were often obfuscated in traditional sample preparation with cross-contamination in heterogeneous, rapidly evolving somatic cell populations.
Our discretely selective top-down approach deconvolutes the lost "outliers" collapsed or abandoned, uncovers biomarkers in subclones of somatic cells at minimal residual level, with no a priori knowledge. The physically clean sample will cleanse and elevate high-quality raw genomic data to be truly AI compatible and safe for medical use, with immediate clinical utility and market impact. We are getting ready to bring our 1st service offering to our partners and customers.
We want to be direct about this, because it shapes every partnership we want to build.
Dimension Genomics Inc is a post-seed stage startup dedicated to the development of new generation of sub-cellular and sub-nuclear single molecule level platform technology, targeting high dimension analysis in somatic cancer and aging cells.
Founded by a team of passionate tech entrepreneurs who have previous experience taking an original idea from Princeton University labs all the way to IPO and commercial products launch that changed how people assemble, study, understand linear genome and diagnose diseases. With decades of unique experience in manipulating macromolecules within designed entropy-controlled microenvironments, genomic mapping and epigenome imaging, droplet microfluidics, and original ecDNA-cancer discovery, our team members span from deep academic research, commercial product development and support, KOL market entry and global expansion, to regulatory filing and approval.
Our collective experience is now aimed at the hardest remaining problem in clinical genomics: seeing a somatic genome as it actually is, one object at a time with real genomic and epigenomic data.
Germline genomics has been built on a genome shared by every cell. The diseases that matter most — cancer, degeneration, aging — are written in the genomes that aren't.
Reading them requires new technology and platform keeping them separate.
We're looking for partners in translational research, clinical application development, and medical AI.
Dimension Genomics Inc. San Diego, California
