At the recent American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) 2025 Annual Meeting held in Chicago last week, Bruker Cellular Analysis proudly unveiled the Beacon Discovery™, a breakthrough benchtop platform designed to democratize live single-cell functional analysis. Buzzing with energy, the Bruker Cellular Analysis booth drew a crowd of passionate researchers, cutting-edge collaborators, and visionary innovators to witness firsthand how we are expanding access to this established, proven technology in a more compact, flexible instrument.
Making Multimodal and Temporal Live Single-Cell Functional Analysis Accessible to Every Lab
Beacon Discovery was launched with strong momentum during a workshop, titled “Introducing Beacon Discovery: Bringing Live Single-Cell Multi-Parameter Functional Analysis to Every Lab.” The session drew a significant crowd and featured leading researchers Dr. Joseph Zenga, MD and Dr. Anthony Zamora, PhD from the Medical College of Wisconsin. Their presentations showcased the scientific possibilities enabled by Opto-Electrical Positioning (OEP®) and the Beacon Discovery system, from unlocking antigen-specific T cells in solid tumors to enabling dynamic functional studies of cancer and immune cells in real time.
Dr. Zenga presented how Beacon Discovery enables precise single-cell functional profiling of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), accelerating therapeutic TCR discovery in head and neck cancers. “With Beacon Discovery,” he noted, “we’re bringing high-content TCR discovery into more hands, faster than ever before.”
Dr. Zamora presented how CAR T cell function can vary widely based on both patient differences and manufacturing approaches. Using the Beacon® platform, he showed that optimizing manufacturing conditions can enhance CAR T cell potency and improve early tumor-killing responses. In another study using Beacon, he explored factors shaping tumor immunogenicity and T cell recognition, emphasizing the higher potential of gene fusions to trigger immune responses. His work suggests that different tumor antigens and TCR designs lead to varied therapeutic effectiveness and specificity.
Bruker Cellular Analysis also presented 3 posters at AACR, showcasing various applications of the Beacon platform such as functional interrogation of human T cells, highly parallel integrated functional and sequencing analysis of single cells, and streamlined discovery of internalizing antibodies.
Beacon Discovery delivers the power of longitudinal single cell functional analysis in a compact format with lower cost of ownership. By prioritizing accessibility and ease-of-use, Beacon Discovery opens the door for academic labs, biotech innovators, and translational researchers to push the boundaries of T-cell profiling and CAR/TCR discovery, antibody discovery and profiling, cell therapy development, and infectious and autoimmune disease research. Using Beacon Discovery, researchers can run real-time sequential multiplexed assays on the same live-cell single cells and ultimately link functional phenotypes to transcriptomic or genomic signatures.