Amos Lee, PhD, CEO of Meteor Biotech, didn’t initially set out to commercialize a spatial biology platform. For nearly a decade, he and his collaborators developed a cell isolation technology at Seoul National University. However, as demand from researchers surged, Lee found himself faced with a choice: let the technology languish in obscurity or spin it out into a new company. That decision led to the founding of Meteor Biotech.
Today, Meteor Biotech is carving out a space within the spatial omics landscape. Its technology, SLACS (Spatially-resolved Laser Activated Cell Sorting), enables researchers to physically isolate and extract specific cells from tissue sections, preserving their spatial context while making them accessible for a broad range of downstream multi-omics analyses. Unlike many spatial omics platforms focused on mapping expression patterns across tissue samples, SLACS acts as an active spatial cell sorter.
Currently, Lee, doesn’t see the company as a competitor to companies that offer spatial platforms (like 10x Genomics or Bruker). In fact, he tells GEN, Meteor’s technology is designed to follow them. Once a researcher knows what cell type they want to study in more depth, that’s where SLACS steps in.
A platform born of necessity
The seeds of Meteor Biotech were planted for Lee’s during his graduate studies in biophotonics and nanoengineering under Sunghoon Kwon, PhD, at Seoul National University. Kwon’s lab fostered a philosophy of developing engineering tools with real-world medical applications. As part of that mission, Lee conducted interviews with clinicians and biomedical researchers about what tools they were missing.
The consensus: a method for connecting pathological features to rich molecular data in a precise and targeted way. Over the next ten years, Lee, Kwon, and Sumin Lee, PhD, (now Meteor Biotech’s CTO) developed SLACS technology.
Originally, the team saw themselves as academic collaborators, but the growing number of researchers wanting access to the tool made it clear that remaining in academia would limit the technology’s reach. In 2022, the team launched Meteor Biotech to bring SLACS to a wider user base. The company’s first product, CosmoSort, was commercialized in 2024.
SLACS
SLACS is a spatial cell isolation platform. The CosmoSort instrument functions like a laser microdissection system—but with critical differences. Instead of using UV light, which can damage genetic material, CosmoSort uses infrared laser pulses to physically eject target cells from tissue sections into individual PCR tubes.
“Think of it as a laser puncher,” Lee said. After targeting the cell of interest, it can be retrieved into a tube. “From there, anything you can do with a PCR tube, you can do with this cell.”
That includes downstream assays such as whole genome sequencing, transcriptomics, ATAC-seq, and mass spectrometry-based proteomics, etc. Researchers can identify cells of interest manually, through immunofluorescence staining, or with AI-generated image annotations. Lee reported that CosmoSort’s software can integrate external images and translate coordinates to automate cell isolation.
Not a competitor, but a complement?
Rather than displacing existing spatial tools, SLACS is designed to work downstream from them, Lee told GEN. Other spatial technology platforms offer panoramic views of gene expression or protein localization. SLACS enables researchers to follow up on those observations by extracting and deeply profiling the most relevant cells.
Lee reported that the platform is especially useful when researchers are past gene counting and want to do transcript isoform profiling or de novo proteomics.
The most frequent comparison, Lee said, comes not from spatial omics platforms but from laser capture microdissection systems. While these can cut specific regions from tissue, they are slower, less precise, and often more damaging to biological material. “We don’t use UV, and our system is much faster,” said Lee. “But we are limited to square shape isolation.”
Use cases and impact
SLACS is particularly well-suited to heterogeneous diseases like cancer, autoimmune conditions, and inflammation, where subclonal populations or rare cells may play outsized roles in disease progression. It’s also proving valuable for researchers working with organoids or other high-value, low-yield samples where slide cost and efficiency are critical.
Han-Byoel Lee, MD, PhD, a breast cancer surgeon and researcher at Seoul National University Hospital, used SLACS to study clinically important regions in breast cancer samples, including tumor margins and immune-excluded areas. “These zones potentially relate directly to recurrence, therapeutic resistance, or poor prognosis, so being able to study them more precisely has been incredibly valuable,” he said. One of his team’s notable findings was the identification of an epitranscriptomic variant of GPX4 in hypoxic and invasive regions—a discovery that would have been difficult with conventional spatial tools.
“Many spatial technologies are great at giving a wide view of the tissue,” Lee noted, “but as a clinician, I’m more interested in zooming in on the cells that could actually affect the patient’s outcome. SLACS gives us the ability to physically isolate those cells—whether they’re immune suppressive, stem-like, or actively escaping therapy—and analyze them separately.”
He added that SLACS integrates seamlessly into their clinical workflow: “After reviewing the pathology slides—H&E or IHC—we define regions of interest based on clinical questions. SLACS then allows us to extract those specific cells directly from the tissue.”
Another notable use case was in kidney inflammation. Meteor researchers used AI to identify a previously uncharacterized image feature correlated with patient prognosis. With SLACS, they were able to physically isolate the regions bearing this feature and begin molecular profiling to determine potential therapeutic targets.
Scaling the platform
Meteor’s first generation of CosmoSort is priced at $350,000. The company is actively collecting user feedback to inform its next-generation model. While academic users remain a key market, Meteor Biotech is interested in expanding to pharmaceutical companies.
To support expansion, Meteor is pursuing both venture capital and strategic partnerships. Lee emphasized that the ultimate vision is not just to provide a tool, but to contribute to the discovery of the first new drug found using SLACS.
The platform has been used in both academic and pharmaceutical settings, with sites now operating in South Korea and the United States. Meteor recently opened a U.S. office at UCLA California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI).
Looking ahead
Beyond oncology and inflammation, Lee has a personal scientific ambition: to use SLACS to explore the molecular basis of memory. By extracting and profiling neurons involved in memory formation, he hopes the technology might one day shed light on the biochemical encoding of lived experience.
In the meantime, Meteor continues to focus on refining its platform, expanding its user base, and building out applications in omics-driven drug discovery. With roots in academic problem-solving and a technology that complements rather than competes, Meteor Biotech represents a thoughtful and targeted evolution in the spatial biology space.
