QIAGEN to Acquire Parse Biosciences, Expanding Portfolio into Scalable Single-Cell Sequencing and AI-Driven Discovery
QIAGEN (NYSE: QGEN; Frankfurt Prime Standard: QIA) announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to fully acquire Parse Biosciences, a leading U.S.-based innovator in scalable, instrument-free single-cell sequencing technologies. This strategic move is poised to strengthen QIAGEN’s fast-growing Sample technologies portfolio and enable it to further penetrate one of the most dynamic segments of modern molecular research: single-cell biology supported by artificial intelligence (AI).
Under the agreement, QIAGEN will pay approximately $225 million in cash upfront, with additional milestone-based payments of up to $55 million contingent upon performance targets. The transaction is expected to close in December 2025 pending regulatory approvals under the U.S. Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act and customary closing conditions.
The acquisition is a powerful acknowledgement of the transformative role of single-cell data in drug discovery, disease research and precision medicine. By incorporating Parse Biosciences’ powerful Evercode platform and related solutions, QIAGEN aims to deliver a comprehensive, scalable workflow that enables researchers to process, analyze and interpret large-scale cellular data from sample preparation to actionable insight. Combined with QIAGEN Digital Insights (QDI), the company’s bioinformatics offering, the addition of Parse’s technology ecosystem positions QIAGEN to support the next generation of AI-enabled biological investigation.
Transforming Single-Cell Analysis through Scale
Single-cell sequencing has reconfigured the landscape of molecular biology by allowing scientists to examine gene expression at the resolution of individual cells. This technique has revealed cellular heterogeneity in tissues, provided mechanistic insight into disease pathways and identified novel therapeutic targets. As researchers increasingly seek multi-million cell data sets to train predictive computational models, scalable single-cell approaches have become central to both academic research and pharmaceutical drug discovery.
The global single-cell analysis market is projected to grow from approximately $1.2 billion in 2024 to nearly $2.1 billion by 2029, representing a compound annual growth rate of roughly 10%. This rapid expansion has been driven largely by the momentum of AI-powered drug discovery workflows. Large-scale single-cell data is a critical input to support predictive biology, fueling algorithmic models trained to understand disease processes, cell states, and therapeutic response at unprecedented depth.
The acquisition places QIAGEN squarely at the forefront of this market transformation. Parse Biosciences, headquartered in Seattle, Washington, has risen quickly in the research community because of its highly differentiated technology, which makes large-scale single-cell experiments more accessible, efficient and scalable. At the heart of its offering is the proprietary Evercode platform — a combinatorial barcoding chemistry that enables researchers to analyze millions to billions of individual cells without requiring expensive instruments or specialized infrastructure.
This instrument-free workflow dramatically reduces barriers to adoption, allowing more laboratories to scale single-cell sequencing efforts quickly and cost-effectively. This positions QIAGEN to serve a growing base of customers seeking integrated, end-to-end workflows that connect sample preparation, sequencing and computational analytics.
Strategic Alignment with QIAGEN: Advancing Toward an AI-Powered Future
With the addition of Parse’s suite of Biosciences technologies, QIAGEN seeks to deepen its reach in the Sample technologies category while strengthening its bioinformatics solutions. QIAGEN’s Sample business sits at the core of its value proposition: enabling customers to access and prepare high-quality biological material. Through this deal, QIAGEN positions itself to support the next major leap — generating high-resolution single-cell data at scale, and translating that information into AI-ready biological models.
Single-cell analysis is emerging as a crucial tool to map the functional architecture of cells and tissues. It decomposes complex biological systems into their constituent cellular components, enabling researchers to pinpoint causal molecular mechanisms underlying cancer, neurological disease, infectious disease and inflammatory disorders. These insights feed computational engines that simulate cellular behavior and test therapeutic hypotheses more efficiently than traditional experimental screening.
Thierry Bernard, CEO of QIAGEN, emphasized the transformative potential of integrating Parse’s platforms within QIAGEN’s existing capabilities. “Single-cell analysis is the key to understanding health and disease at a mechanistic level,” he said. “By combining Parse with our Sample technologies portfolio and QDI bioinformatics offering, we can provide researchers with the tools to generate the massive datasets required to build predictive virtual cell models that fuel AI-based drug discovery.”
Bernard noted that the integration will allow customers to access complete workflows — from sample to insight — enabling analysis at a scale that Biosciences previously required more specialized infrastructure. The company also underscored that the high-growth single-cell segment aligns well with its long-term investment priorities, given its accelerating adoption across both academic and pharmaceutical research.
Alex Rosenberg, PhD, CEO and co-founder of Parse Biosciences, expressed enthusiasm for joining the QIAGEN ecosystem. “Parse was founded to make single-cell sequencing accessible to any lab,” Rosenberg said. “As our team joins QIAGEN, we want to accelerate that mission and extend the reach of our technology to more customers around the world. QIAGEN’s strong commitment to Sample technologies and its global infrastructure make it an ideal partner for our next stage of growth.”
Inside Parse Biosciences: Differentiated Technology and Market Reach
Parse Biosciences has emerged as a leader in single-cell sequencing largely due to its ability to scale analysis in a simplified, instrument-free manner. Its chemistry is optimized to allow researchers to profile many more cells per experiment than competing systems, which is particularly attractive for emerging research areas requiring big-data scale.
Among the company’s most notable achievements is the Tahoe-100M dataset — the largest publicly accessible single-cell RNA sequencing data resource to date. This dataset encompasses more than 100 million single-cell Biosciences transcriptomes and reflects the tremendous scale at which Parse technologies enable biological data generation. Such large datasets are a vital foundation for state-of-the-art computational biology and machine learning, allowing researchers to discern subtle cell-state signatures and uncover rare populations involved in disease.
The company’s technology platform features several advantages:
■ Instrument-Free Scalability
Unlike many competing platforms that require proprietary hardware, Parse’s chemistry-based approach allows customers to perform single-cell sequencing experiments using standard laboratory equipment. This eliminates capital expenditure barriers and supports rapid deployment across diverse research environments. As a result, the technology is uniquely suited for laboratories of all sizes, from small academic groups to large pharmaceutical teams, accelerating adoption and enabling global accessibility.
■ Data Scale and Quality
Parse solutions support extremely high-throughput analysis, generating clean, high-resolution data suitable for both basic and translational research. The Biosciences company’s Tahoe-100M dataset showcases its ability to deliver unparalleled scale, yielding the world’s largest collection of single-cell transcriptomes. These strengths allow customers to pursue multi-million cell projects in disease modeling, cellular mapping and drug target discovery.
■ GigaLab Service
Parse’s GigaLab is a high-throughput offering that complements its chemistry platform by providing scalable project management and execution. With a capacity of 2.5 billion cells per year, GigaLab enables customers to process multi-million cell datasets without needing to expand internal resources. This service supports pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical customers engaged in large-scale target screens across oncology, immunology, neurology and other therapeutic areas.
■ Broad Global Adoption
More than 3,000 laboratories worldwide — including all of the top 50 academic research institutions and the world’s 10 largest pharmaceutical companies — utilize Parse products. This remarkable footprint illustrates rapid market traction and validates the user-friendly, scalable value proposition of the Evercode platform.
■ Intellectual Property Strength
Parse Biosciences holds an exclusive license to 36 granted patents from the University of Washington related to split-pool Biosciences combinatorial barcoding across all application areas. This intellectual property portfolio provides a broad competitive moat and protects core technological processes.
Financial Terms and Future Outlook
Under the transaction terms, QIAGEN will acquire all outstanding equity of Parse Biosciences for $225 million in cash at closing. An additional $55 million may be paid based on the achievement of performance-related milestones over several years. The acquisition is anticipated to close by December 2025, subject to regulatory review and customary conditions.
QIAGEN stated that Parse will not materially contribute to financial results in 2025 as integration activities proceed. However, starting in 2026, the company expects approximately $40 million in revenue contributions — supporting roughly two percentage points of corporate growth. Management projects strong double-digit revenue expansion in subsequent years as Parse products take advantage of QIAGEN’s global commercial infrastructure and customer base.
From a profitability perspective, the transaction is expected to have a modest dilutive impact on adjusted earnings per share of approximately $0.04 in 2026 due to upfront investment. By 2028, the Biosciences acquisition is expected to become accretive, reflecting increasing revenue contribution and operational synergies.
Shaping the Future of AI-Ready Biology
QIAGEN’s acquisition of Parse Biosciences signals a major step toward enabling scaled biological discovery in the era of AI. The combined strengths of Parse’s high-throughput, instrument-free single-cell technologies and QIAGEN’s Sample technologies and QDI analytics ecosystem promise to deliver streamlined solutions that can support increasingly complex research demands.
As drug developers and researchers turn to computational models to predict therapeutic behavior and identify novel targets, the need for vast, high-quality cellular datasets will grow rapidly. With Parse’s scalable platforms and services, QIAGEN looks poised to become a central player in this evolving space — providing tools that drive scientific breakthroughs and accelerate the path from hypothesis to clinical insight.
By uniting scalable chemistry, global reach and cutting-edge bioinformatics, QIAGEN is laying the groundwork for an end-to-end single-cell AI platform that may ultimately reshape how biological systems are understood and how new medicines are discovered.
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