Kim
Kelderman

The Vacutainer blood tube is one of those inventions so ubiquitous it's invisible. If you've ever had blood drawn at a hospital, you've used one. Kim Kelderman once ran that global business at Becton Dickinson. It's a useful detail - not because it's glamorous, but because it tells you something about where he operates: in the foundational infrastructure of medicine, the stuff that makes everything else possible.

Kelderman grew up in the Netherlands, studied at Hogeschool Heerlen - now Zuyd University of Applied Sciences - and later went through Columbia Business School. The combination of Dutch pragmatism and American business strategy shows up in the way he runs things: methodical, results-focused, and comfortable at scale. He spent the better part of two decades at Thermo Fisher Scientific, eventually managing the Platforms and Content division of the Genetic Sciences unit. That meant overseeing instrumentation, software, consumables, and assay lines under brands like Applied Biosystems and legacy Affymetrix - household names if your household happens to be a molecular biology lab.

He joined Bio-Techne in April 2018 as President of the Diagnostics and Genomics Segment - not the top job, but arguably the most consequential role in the company at the time. The segment was home to Advanced Cell Diagnostics (ACD), maker of RNAscope technology, which lets researchers visualize individual RNA molecules inside intact cells. It sounds niche. It wasn't. Spatial biology - mapping gene expression in tissue with spatial context - would go on to become one of the hottest categories in life science tools, and Kelderman's team was already building the infrastructure for it.

Under his watch as segment president, ACD's revenue doubled. Not because the market handed it to them - spatial biology was still convincing labs to rethink their workflows. It happened because Kelderman's team executed: new product introductions, strategic partnerships, and a focus on reproducibility that resonated with researchers tired of fighting their reagents. Bio-Techne's pitch - high-quality, consistent research tools that actually work - is deceptively simple and extraordinarily hard to deliver.

The ExoDx Prostate test followed. A liquid biopsy that measures exosomal RNA to help clinicians decide whether a patient needs a prostate biopsy, ExoDx represented the diagnostics half of the segment's mandate. Commercializing a diagnostic test requires a completely different playbook from selling research reagents - regulatory pathways, clinical lab relationships, reimbursement strategy. Kelderman navigated it.

Two acquisitions completed under his segment tenure - Asuragen, a molecular diagnostics company focused on genetic analysis, and Lunaphore, a Swiss spatial biology company working on highly multiplexed tissue imaging - added breadth to the portfolio. Both fit the same thesis: Bio-Techne as the company that tools up the toolmakers, that supplies the picks and shovels to the gold rush of precision medicine.