Stellaromics secures $25 million in series a funding to advance 3D spatial multi-omic profiling

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 technology that promises to accelerate the development of fundamentally novel drug treatments, including for autoimmune diseases, cancer, neuropsychiatric disorders, and infectious diseases.

In tandem with the fundraise, Stellaromics has appointed Todd Dickinson, Ph.D., as President & CEO. Dickinson is a life sciences industry pioneer, with more than 20 years of experience developing and commercializing disruptive genomics technologies. He was an early scientist of Illumina, and held a variety of technical and commercial executive roles both at Illumina, Bionano Genomics, and most recently as CEO of Cantata Bio (formerly Dovetail Genomics and Arc Bio).

In addition, Ye Fu, Ph.D., has been appointed as CTO. Fu most recently served as Principal at Plaisance 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 more than 18,000 citations. His PhD thesis opened the field of reversible RNA modifications, which is the foundational work for the 2023 Wolf Prize in Chemistry, one of the most prestigious international chemistry awards.

Founding team defining the next generation of spatial technology

Stellaromics Scientific Co-Founders are world-renowned scientists Karl Deisseroth, M.D., 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 expression levels of thousands of genes within intact tissue, at the sub-cellular, single molecule level. Most recently, Wang has 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 innovations, as published in Science, Nature, and Cell.

“Stellaromics is on a mission to propel biomedical research forward by setting a new standard in in situ spatial analysis. Spatial biology has quickly established itself as one of the most exciting biological technologies of this decade. But today’s approaches remain constrained to two-dimensional tissue profiles, and limited largely to expression of a handful of genes at a single point in time. Our goal is to enable scientists to capture ultra high-resolution, three-dimensional, multi-omic information from thick tissue samples, mapping not only gene expression patterns, but also revealing those genes that are being translated to proteins. By generating a far richer, functional readout of each cell in its native state across a broad range of different samples, from tumors to neurological disease samples, our technology will enable a new level of insight into the mechanisms of disease and how to treat them,” said CEO Dickinson. “With this round of funding, we are entering an exciting 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 information inside in situ tissue, this latest round of financing will be used to fortify the business and establish a new company headquarters to house its growing team of innovators. The company will continue to focus on advancing the development of its revolutionary Plexa^™ products; the alpha version is expected to be available via a Technology Access Program in early 2024.