A Boston biotech reading gene expression through intact tissue - up to 100 microns thick - instead of on flat glass slides.
For more than a decade, spatial biology has meant slicing tissue into sheets thinner than a sheet of paper, staining them, and reading gene activity across a two-dimensional plane. It works. It also throws away a dimension that living tissue never had the luxury of losing.
Stellaromics, founded in Boston in 2022, was built on a stubborn premise: the interesting biology lives in the third dimension. Cells sit inside microenvironments. Neurons wire across depth. Tumors organize in volume. Flatten any of it and the wiring diagram frays. The company's answer is a platform called Pyxa that reads gene expression inside intact tissue up to 100 microns thick - roughly the width of a human hair - at subcellular resolution.
The science is not a marketing invention. It came out of two of the most decorated labs in the field. STARmap - Spatially-resolved Transcript Amplicon Readout Mapping - emerged from Karl Deisseroth's laboratory at Stanford. RIBOmap, which reads not just which genes are transcribed but which are actively being translated into protein, came from Xiao Wang's lab at MIT and the Broad Institute. Both methods were published in Science, Nature and Cell before Stellaromics existed to sell them.
The bet is dimensional, not incremental. Where much of the market races to pack more genes into a 2D readout, Stellaromics went after depth - the axis competitors mostly leave on the table.
Two-dimensional spatial platforms - the category dominated by 10x Genomics, Vizgen, and Bruker's NanoString lines - map tissue on a slice. That's enough for many questions. It is not enough when the biology you care about is the arrangement of things in space: synaptic connectivity across a neural circuit, the layered architecture of a tumor microenvironment, immune cells threading through a three-dimensional niche.
Stellaromics' pitch to a skeptical scientific audience is narrow and testable: keep the tissue whole, read it in volume, and stop guessing at what a slice cannot show.
Figure: approximate, for orientation only. Source: company materials.
"Stellaromics emerged from a clear need - moving beyond 2D spatial biology."
Todd Dickinson, Chief Executive OfficerThe commercial system for True 3D spatial multi-omics. It folds sample prep, automated volumetric confocal imaging, and analysis/visualization into one workflow - and runs up to 12 wells at once.
In situ sequencing that measures gene expression inside intact tissue at single-molecule, subcellular resolution. The founding technology, born in Deisseroth's Stanford lab.
Maps ribosome-bound mRNA - the genes a cell is actively turning into protein. It extends spatial analysis from transcriptomics into translatomics.
Pyxa is a research tool aimed at academic and biomedical labs working in neuroscience, oncology and immunology. Named early and beta users span the Vollum Institute at OHSU, Stanford University, Scripps Research, the University of Glasgow, UC Irvine, and Emory University School of Medicine - the kind of demanding first customers who double as the toughest reviewers a tools company can face.
Stellaromics runs a classic life-science-tools model: sell and support the Pyxa instrument, then sell the STARmap and RIBOmap reagents and services that run on it. An early-access program - fully subscribed ahead of launch - seeded the first sites, with broader commercial shipments following. Instrument sales up front, recurring consumables behind them.
The company operates in a spatial-biology market analysts project to move past $2 billion by the end of the decade - a crowded field where Stellaromics' differentiator is not price or plex count, but the third axis.
The core 3D transcript-mapping method emerges from Karl Deisseroth's Stanford lab.
Xiao Wang's lab reports spatial mapping of translation, adding translatomics to the approach.
Incorporated in Boston to commercialize the STARmap and RIBOmap technologies.
Plaisance Capital leads the round to build the team and product suite.
The platform debuts at AGBT as Catalyst4 leads an $80M round.
Beta installations begin at UC Irvine and Emory University School of Medicine.
"Spatial biology has quickly established itself as one of the most exciting biological technologies of this decade."
Todd Dickinson, CEO"We enable scientists to capture ultra high-resolution, three-dimensional, multi-omic information from thick tissue samples."
Todd Dickinson, CEO"One of the most rewarding moments was unveiling our Pyxa platform at this year's AGBT Conference."
Todd Dickinson, CEO"Advance discoveries that enhance human health - by revealing the complexities of biological systems in intact tissue."
Stellaromics missionChemistry-and-theology dual degree from St. Olaf, a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from Tufts, time at Illumina during its rise, and prior CEO roles at Dovetail Genomics and Arc Bio.
Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder, formerly of Plaisance Capital and a founding contributor to several biotech companies. His published work has been cited more than 18,000 times.
Karl Deisseroth (Stanford, optogenetics pioneer) and Xiao Wang (MIT / Broad Institute) - the scientists whose labs produced STARmap and RIBOmap.
Watch: search Stellaromics' YouTube channel for Pyxa product demos and the AGBT 2025 launch. Read the CEO interview at Pulse 2.0.