illumina
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Sasan Amini
Sasan Amini is the co-founder and CEO of Clear Labs, a San Carlos genomics company that turns next-generation DNA sequencing into a push-button diagnostic for food safety and infectious disease. An Iranian immigrant who left Tehran at 22, he earned a PhD in genomics at Princeton, worked in advanced research at Illumina, and in 2014 set out to make sequencing simple enough for any lab to run. When COVID-19 hit, Clear Labs pivoted its automated platform into SARS-CoV-2 surveillance and reached more than half of U.S. public health labs.
Todd Dickinson
Todd Dickinson is the CEO and a board member of Stellaromics, a Boston biotech commercializing 3D spatial biology born from Karl Deisseroth's Stanford lab and Xiao Wang's work at MIT and the Broad Institute. A Tufts-trained analytical chemist who did his PhD under David Walt, he spent more than 20 years turning genomics inventions into products: over a decade at Illumina during its rise as the DNA-sequencing leader, commercial work on Bionano Genomics' Irys nanochannel arrays, and CEO stints at Dovetail Genomics and Arc Bio, which he merged into Cantata Bio in 2022. At Stellaromics he raised $80 million in Series B (led by Catalyst4 with Stanford University Ventures) to launch Pyxa, the first commercial platform that reads gene expression inside intact tissue up to 40x thicker than conventional methods.
Paul Scagnetti
Paul Scagnetti is the CEO of ONI (Oxford Nanoimaging), the Oxford spin-out behind the Nanoimager, the first desktop super-resolution microscope to see single molecules at 20 nanometer resolution. A mechanical engineer with a PhD from MIT and 25+ years in life sciences and instruments, he left a job he loved at Illumina in February 2023 to bet that making Nobel-grade imaging simple enough for any lab would change drug discovery. In January 2025 he shipped the Aplo Scope, which he calls the biggest launch in ONI's history.
Alex Aravanis
Alex Aravanis is the CEO and co-founder of Moonwalk Biosciences, a precision epigenetics company he launched in 2024 with $57 million and Broad Institute scientist Feng Zhang. An engineer-turned-physician with degrees from UC Berkeley and Stanford, he co-founded the cancer early-detection company GRAIL, later returned to Illumina as Chief Technology Officer, and now wants to rewrite the 'software of the genome' without cutting a single strand of DNA.
Swamy Vijayan
Swamy Vijayan is the CEO and cofounder of Zafrens, a San Diego biotech reinventing drug discovery by shrinking a 96-well plate down to 200,000 microwells that image and sequence single cells at once. A physicist by training who admits he was driven less by a love of biology than by dissatisfaction with theoretical physics, he is a serial founder whose previous company Omniome sold to Pacific Biosciences for up to $800 million. His stated goal is not a quick exit but a foundation for smart people to do important things for the next 100 years.
Vik Vaz
Vik Vaz is a physician-turned-executive who became CEO and President of San Diego multi-omics biotech Pleno Inc. in December 2024, arriving the same day the company closed a $25M Series B. Trained as a surgeon and interventional oncologist, he later ran strategy and companion diagnostics at Illumina and was a partner at both McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group. At Pleno he is commercializing the RAPTOR platform, which uses proprietary Hypercoding technology to detect DNA, RNA and protein targets in a single sample at high speed and low cost.
Elaine Cheung
Elaine Cheung is Chief Business Officer at Moonwalk Biosciences, a South San Francisco biotech backed by $57 million in funding and co-founded by CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang and former Illumina CTO Alex Aravanis. With 20+ years navigating the inflection points of genomic medicine - from spinning GRAIL out of Illumina, helping architect its $900M+ Series B, and steering Lyell Immunopharma through its IPO - Cheung brings a rare combination of scientific literacy and deal-making precision. At Moonwalk, she is helping build the business infrastructure for a company that has pivoted from epigenetic editing to siRNA-based therapeutics targeting adipose biology and obesity.