10x Genomics, Inc.  announced the commercial availability of BEAM (Barcode Enabled Antigen Mapping), a kitted solution for antibody and T-cell receptor (TCR) discovery. Built on top of 10x's Chromium Single Cell Immune Profiling product, BEAM's proprietary antigen screening approach is fast and robust, delivering hundreds of antigen-receptor pairs with single cell gene expression. The combination of robust screening; simple, fast, and validated workflows; and, comprehensive interrogation of each cell has the potential to greatly accelerate and improve therapeutic discovery. It remains difficult and costly to match antigens of interest with specific B- or T- cell receptors.

Conventional methods are slow, laborious and lack full-length paired V(D)J receptor sequences. BEAM solves these challenges by offering ready-to-use kitted reagents for uniquely tagging and multiplexing antigens of interest. BEAM's protocol is fully optimized, takes only a week to run and is paired with an easy-to-use software that identifies and matches putative antigens with their cognate full-length paired V(D)J receptors.

The result is a comprehensive solution to interrogate the genetics and binding specificities of thousands of individual antigen-specific B- and T- cells, providing an expansive view of the underlying immune repertoires against pathogens and diseases.