Traditional high-dimensional molecular profiling in biology hits the same wall: to measure a cell, you have to kill it, so you never see what it would have become. In genome engineering, most delivery methods cannot access the genome without altering the cell's fitness or fate.
Summer did not slow down Cytosurge. Over two weeks in July 2026, Dr. Tobias Beyer, Cytosurge's CSO and lead for international business development, took these challenges, and Cytosurge's answer to them, across three countries and two continents, from Imperial College London to the MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.
Five very different rooms. One message: the next leap in biology is not just single-cell; it is same-cell. Same-Cell Biology reveals what cells become and why, by engineering or perturbing a specific living cell, measuring the resulting molecular response, and tracking subsequent phenotypic changes over time, all in the same living cell.
London: where the trip began
The trip opened at Imperial College London, at a mini-symposium hosted by the Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein and the London Biofoundry and organized by Thomas Gassler, PhD, of the Bezos Centre, and Marko Storch, PhD, Co-Director of the London Biofoundry. Fellow speakers included Orane Guillaume-Gentil, PhD (EPFL), one of the scientists behind the invention of live-cell sequencing (Live-seq), and Lukas Meile, PhD (ETH Zurich). Thanks also to Mehboob Abdulkadir Surve of Swift Analytical Ltd, Cytosurge's UK distributor, for his support.
At the center of it all: Cytosurge's FluidFM® technology and the OMNIUM platform. The FluidFM Nanosyringe, able to extract a picoliter-scale RNA biopsy from a cell's cytoplasm and pair it with live-cell imaging, so the same cell's transcriptome, morphology, and behavior are captured together while the cell survives to be measured again.
Philadelphia: precision at the bedside of research
Next was the Fox Chase Cancer Center, for a Lunch & Learn in the Reimann Auditorium organized by Manna Ahmed, MD, and Johnathan Whetstine, PhD, of the Genomics Resource Facility. Joined by Barrie Rogers, B.S., of Altium Int., Cytosurge's US and Canadian distributor, Tobias showed a mixed audience of cancer researchers and interns how FluidFM OMNIUM combines nanofluidics and atomic force microscopy for precise, minimally disruptive single-cell work, from Live-seq to targeted perturbation and mechanobiology.
Toronto: coming full circle
Toronto carried a personal thread. At the University of Toronto's Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, Tobias spoke in the Red Room, the same room where, as a postdoc in the Wrana Lab at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Sinai Health, the weekly lab meeting was held.
The event was organized by Shamini Ayyadhury, PhD, and her team at PANORAMICS – A Vision Inc., whose Spatial Nexus Program connects the single-cell and spatial biology community, and included a short meeting with Prof. Mikko Taipale, also of the Donnelly Centre.
Boston: two stops, one throughline
Boston brought the roadshow's busiest leg. At SCP2026, hosted at Northeastern University and organized by the university's Prof. Nikolai Slavov, Tobias and Barrie Rogers staffed the Cytosurge booth for two days at the field's flagship conference.
The conversations there also pointed to where Live-seq is headed next: a workflow that feeds FluidFM OMNIUM's single-cell samples directly into mass-spectrometry-based sample prep is already in development, extending Live-seq from transcriptomics toward same-cell proteomics.
The trip closed at the MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, for a Lunch & Learn in the Luria Auditorium organized by Tarek Fadel, PhD. Tobias's talk tied the roadshow together: longitudinal transcriptomic analysis of the same living cell, targeted single-cell delivery for perturbation studies, and gentle isolation of rare cells for spatial and multi-omic analysis. The team also visited Mushriq Al-Jazrawe, PhD, and the High Throughput Sciences Core to explore how FluidFM could complement existing core workflows.
The same cell is the answer
Every one of those five rooms, across three countries and two continents, returned to the same question: what if measuring a cell no longer meant losing it? Live-seq is Cytosurge’s answer: a biopsy gentle enough to preserve the living cell, and a probe precise enough to return to that same cell over time.
That is what made this more than a roadshow. It became a demonstration of momentum: across different scientific audiences and settings, the same challenge resonated, and Same-Cell Biology provided a proven new way to study how living cells change over time.
The Same-Cell, Four Different Cities
Inside Cytosurge's July 2026 Same-Cell Roadshow