About
Computational biology guided by the research question.
Scilytica is an independent computational biology company based in Seattle, Washington. It supports research teams through analytical services, applied research, and scientific software development.
Current work focuses on single-cell, spatial, and multi-omics research.
How Scilytica works
Scilytica designs, evaluates, and develops computational analyses for biological studies, considering the study design, available data, and assumptions behind candidate methods. Established methods are used where appropriate, adapted where needed, and compared under conditions relevant to the study.
Insights from this work inform the open-source Scilytica Toolkit and other software under development, addressing recurring analytical and workflow gaps as biological technologies and methods evolve.
Reproducible software and documented workflows keep methods, inputs, execution, and results connected. This makes analytical choices easier to inspect and the work easier to reproduce and extend.
Research
Locked-reference mapping for spatial transcriptomics.
TN-003 reports how a locked kidney reference behaved when applied patient by patient to an independent Xenium cohort. It includes patient-level and class-level evaluation, comparison with a simpler locked method, and limitations that remain.
ANA-018 is examining whether a cross-platform kidney atlas can provide a stable reference for new CosMx and Xenium patient samples while keeping their measurement models separate.
TN-003 is published. Study design and validation for ANA-018 are in progress.
Scientific leadership
Mark D’Ascenzo
Founder & Principal Computational Biologist
Mark D’Ascenzo is the founder of Scilytica and a computational biologist with more than 15 years of experience in genomics, bioinformatics, and analytical method development across biotechnology and academic research.
His work has included computational analysis and scientific software development for translational research, with a focus on methods that can be understood, evaluated, and reproduced. Before founding Scilytica, Mark held scientific roles at Roche Sequencing Solutions and UW Medicine and served as Principal Data Scientist at a translational diagnostics startup spun out of the Institute for Systems Biology. He holds an M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Cornell University.
Work with Scilytica