About
Developing science, software, and analytical systems together.
Scilytica is an independent computational-biology and scientific-software company based in Seattle, Washington. It develops reusable technology for life-science research and provides expert services today.
Current work is centered on single-cell, spatial, and multi-omics research, supported by broader experience across transcriptomics, genomics, statistical and machine-learning methods, NGS bioinformatics, workflow engineering, cloud infrastructure, and scalable research computing.
The way we work
Research and computation develop together.
Biological questions often become more precise as evidence accumulates. New data can change what an analysis needs to accomplish, while limitations in existing methods may only become visible once they are applied to a particular study.
Scilytica keeps the biological question, analytical method, and computational implementation connected. Methods are considered in the context of the data and the question they are intended to address, not simply by whether they run successfully or improve a metric.
Exploratory analysis is part of that process. Approaches may need to be compared, assumptions reconsidered, and methods changed as the evidence develops. When an approach becomes useful, its reasoning can be documented and the analysis made reproducible enough for others to understand and continue.
Engineering supports this work rather than defining it. The appropriate result may be a focused analysis, a statistical model, publication-ready figures, a method comparison, reusable software, or an analytical system that a research team can operate and extend.
Services and products
Apply expertise now. Build reusable technology for what recurs.
Scilytica’s services address current scientific and engineering problems in computational biology, method evaluation, workflow development, performance, and infrastructure.
Product development follows a separate path. Scilytica Toolkit is under active development as reusable Python software for analysis and method evaluation.
Scilytica Workbench is a working prototype being prepared for a design partner program. Its current local workflow-development capabilities and its intended AWS-first analytical environment are described separately so present capability is not confused with product direction.
Explore productsResearch and method development
Let the work inform what comes next.
Many methods in single-cell, spatial, and integrative biology emerge from research laboratories before their strengths, limitations, and appropriate uses are fully understood.
Scilytica works with research groups on these developing areas, both to address specific biological questions and to evaluate analytical approaches under realistic research conditions. The aim is to understand where methods are useful, where they are limited, and what additional controls or evidence a study may require.
Those lessons should not end with one project. Where appropriate, they can inform reusable analytical methods, benchmarking strategies, software, and practical guidance for future work.
Current research
Cross-platform kidney atlas mapping.
Current cross-platform kidney atlas research follows this model. The project is evaluating whether a fixed reference built from spatial and single-nucleus transcriptomic data can map previously unseen patients profiled with CosMx and Xenium. The study design holds out complete patients and prevents their data from influencing the reference. It also accounts for differences between assays and compares frozen mapping with approaches that refit the model.
The purpose is not to assume that one solution generalizes everywhere, but to develop evidence about what can be reused, what must be tested again, and where a different approach is needed.
Study design and validation are in progress.
Scientific leadership
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