Stellaromics, a leading provider of in situ spatial multi-omics technology, today announced that the company has raised $25 million in a Series A financing round. The Series A financing round included Plaisance Capital Management and a private family office based in Silicon Valley. Founded in 2022, the company is developing next-generation spatial technologies that promise to accelerate the development of fundamentally novel drug treatments, including autoimmune diseases, cancer, neuropsychiatric disorders and infectious diseases.
In conjunction with the fundraising, Stellaromics appointed Todd Dickinson, Ph.D., as President and CEO. Dickinson is a pioneer in the life sciences industry, with more than 20 years of experience developing and commercializing disruptive genomics technologies. He was an early scientist at Illumina and held various technical and commercial executive roles as CEO of Illumina, Bionano Genomics, and most recently Cantata Bio (formerly Dovetail Genomics and Arc Bio).
In addition, Ye Fu, Ph.D., has been appointed as CTO. Fu most recently served as a Principal at Placence Capital Management, where he was a founding team member at several breakthrough biotech companies and a co-founder of Stellaromics. He is widely published including first author articles in Cell and Nature Chemical Biology with over 18,000 citations. His PhD thesis opened up the field of reversible RNA modification, the foundational work for the 2023 Wolff Prize in Chemistry, one of the most prestigious international chemistry prizes.
The founding team defines the next generation of spatial technology
Stellaromics Scientific is co-founded by world-renowned scientist Carl Dyserth, MD, Ph.D. and Xiao Wang, Ph.D. Together, they patented the company’s proprietary technology, STARmap (Spatially-Resolved Transcript Amplicon Readout Mapping), capable of measuring the expression levels of thousands of genes within intact tissue, at the sub-cellular, single-molecule level. More recently, Wang developed a breakthrough RIBOmap (ribosome-bound mRNA mapping) technology to measure protein synthesis at single cell and spatial resolution. Stellaromics technology is based on their ground-breaking research and innovation, which has been published in Science, Nature and Cell.
“Stellaromics is on a mission to advance biomedical research by setting a new standard in in situ spatial analysis. Spatial biology has quickly established itself as the most exciting biological technology of this decade. But today’s approaches are limited to two-dimensional tissue profiles and the expression of a handful of genes at a single time. remain limited. Our goal is to enable scientists to capture ultra-high-resolution, three-dimensional, multi-omic data from thick tissue samples, mapping not only gene expression patterns, but also the genes that are translated into proteins. From tumors to neurological disease samples. By generating richer, actionable readouts of each cell’s own state across a wide range of different samples, our technology will enable a new level of insight into disease processes and how to treat them, said CEO Dickinson. “With this round of funding, we have an exciting Entering a growth phase as we expand our team, invest in both innovation and product development, and begin commercialization of what we believe will be a transformative in situ 3D profiling technology.”
With a clear vision to simplify and automate the process of capturing high resolution 3D data in situ tissue, this latest round of funding will be used to strengthen the business and establish a new company headquarters to house a growing team of innovators. The company will continue to focus on developing its revolutionary plexer™ products; The alpha version is expected to be available through the Technology Access Program in early 2024.