NanoString Brand Guidelines: Seattle Barcodes, nCounter & a 2024 Sale to Bruker

Barcoded probes from the Institute for Systems Biology.

NanoString Technologies grew out of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. English Wikipedia says its technology — a digital molecular barcoding method — was invented there under the direction of Leroy Hood, that the institute licensed the original patent, and that the company was spun out and founded as a separate business in 2003 by Krassen Dimitrov, Amber Ratcliffe and Dwayne Dunaway. The business plan, written by Ratcliffe and Aaron Coe, won seed funding in several business-plan competitions, the encyclopedia adds.

The name came from the probes themselves. A “nanostring” was a barcoded piece of DNA carrying a linear sequence of fluorescent dyes; the strings were stretched onto a surface, imaged and counted to detect nucleic acids directly, English Wikipedia explains. As the technology was commercialised, the word became the company’s name and its broad platform brand, while the instrument was sold as the nCounter Analysis System — so in scientific papers “NanoString” can mean the probes, the platform or the company. The encyclopedia says the nCounter system profiles hundreds of genes, proteins, microRNAs or copy-number variations in a single run.

The nCounter system launched in 2008, together with international sales and the first multiplexed gene-expression assays. Brad Gray, formerly of Genzyme, became president and chief executive in 2010, and the company went public in 2013, according to English Wikipedia.

nCounter, GeoMx and CosMx.

The company then moved into spatial biology — measuring genes and proteins in the context of tissue structure. Its first spatial platform, the GeoMx Digital Spatial Profiler, launched in 2019; the second, the CosMx Spatial Molecular Imager, was announced in February 2022 to detect RNA and protein at single-cell resolution in tissue, and began shipping in December 2022 with the AtoMx Spatial Informatics Platform, English Wikipedia says. GEN described GeoMx in 2024 as a spatial multiomic platform for formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded and fresh frozen tissue sections, and CosMx as a high-plex in situ platform working at cellular and subcellular resolution. NanoString said at the time that more than 1,500 of its nCounter, GeoMx and CosMx systems were installed.

Those platforms led to a patent dispute with 10x Genomics. In November 2023 a jury in the US District Court for the District of Delaware found that the GeoMx Digital Spatial Profiler infringed seven patents that 10x held under an exclusive licence from Prognosys Biosciences, GEN reported; NanoString said it would appeal. In the same GEN report, 10x co-founder and chief executive Serge Saxonov defended the company’s patent suits as a way of protecting its investment in research, while NanoString described the litigation as an attempt to narrow the field of spatial platforms. Other cases in the United States and Europe concerned CosMx. In February 2024, NanoString said, the Court of Appeal of the European Unified Patent Court lifted a preliminary injunction affecting CosMx products, restoring sales in 16 countries. In July 2024, after the change of ownership, Bruker announced that an injunction affecting CosMx products in Germany had been suspended.

On 4 February 2024 NanoString and three subsidiaries — including units in Germany and the Netherlands — filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the US Bankruptcy Code. GEN reported that the company pointed to the jury award and the cost of continued litigation, said the filing stayed its patent cases worldwide, and began a review that included a possible sale of all or part of the business.

Instruments, chips and data.

DNA sequencing and genomics-tools companies sell to scientists, yet their pictures tend to repeat a small set of scenes: a benchtop instrument with a glowing panel in a clean, bright laboratory; a flow cell or chip held between gloved fingers; a colourful double helix or a data visualisation; a researcher studying results on a screen. Because the chemistry itself is invisible, the hardware, the consumables and the data become the main images.

Conferences are where many of these companies meet their customers. The Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting, known as AGBT, and the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics, known as ASHG, are regular venues for news. Oxford Nanopore says it presented its first nanopore sequencing data at AGBT in February 2012, and Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News reported in November 2024 that PacBio introduced its Vega benchtop sequencer at ASHG with a concert. Some companies run their own events too: Oxford Nanopore says it held the first London Calling conference for its users in May 2015.

Names and colours do much of the identity work. Instruments carry short, memorable product names, and some companies give their hardware one recognisable colour; GEN reported that PacBio’s new look, introduced with its Revio sequencer, came with a commitment to pink. The palettes in these guides are our own interpretations, not official colour standards.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it, and which platforms it sells — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. Where a company describes its instruments as for research use only, or says they are not intended for diagnosis, as PacBio and Oxford Nanopore do, we report that as the company states it.

A Bruker division since 2024.

The buyer was Bruker, the scientific-instrument group. NanoString announced on 17 April 2024 that it was to be acquired by Bruker Corporation, saying the agreement would bring its Chapter 11 proceedings to an end and was expected to close in early May. English Wikipedia says the bankruptcy court approved the sale on 19 April 2024 and that Bruker bought the assets and rights associated with NanoString’s business; Bruker’s own entry on English Wikipedia lists the NanoString assets among its 2024 acquisitions.

NanoString no longer trades as an independent company. Bruker formed Bruker Spatial Biology, a division combining the former NanoString business with Canopy Biosciences and Bruker Spatial Genomics, formerly Acuity Spatial Genomics, English Wikipedia says. The nanostring.com address now redirects to the Bruker Spatial Biology website, which describes the unit as a division of Bruker Corporation, lists the nCounter Analysis System, the GeoMx Digital Spatial Profiler, the CosMx Spatial Molecular Imager and the AtoMx platform alongside Bruker’s CellScape and PaintScape systems, and gives its base as Bothell, Washington. The NanoString name survives on parts of the site, such as its NanoString University training pages, and the division lists customer-experience laboratories in Seattle and Amsterdam. In April 2024 NanoString had said its Seattle-based operations and product development would continue under the new owner.

For a design guide, NanoString shows how a lab term — the barcoded “nanostring” — can become a company, a platform brand and then a product family inside a larger group. Compare Bruker, its owner since 2024, and 10x Genomics, the spatial-biology company it faced in court. For this guide we use a deep teal, a slate and a soft coral with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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