He builds the machines that let biologists see gene expression inside a piece of tissue - in three dimensions, without slicing it flat.
Todd Dickinson. The chemist who learned commercialization at Illumina and now sells a way to look at tissue the way it actually exists - as a volume, not a slide.
Almost everyone studying tissue does the same thing first: they cut it into a slice thin enough to see through, mount it on glass, and pretend the tissue was always two-dimensional. Todd Dickinson runs the company that decided this was a bad deal. Stellaromics, where he is CEO and a board member, sells an instrument called Pyxa that reads which genes are switched on, cell by cell, inside a block of tissue up to forty times thicker than what a standard slide can hold - and keeps track of where each of those cells sits in space.
The pitch is almost aggressively literal. Biology happens in three dimensions. A tumor is a volume. A brain circuit is a volume. Reading them as a stack of torn pages loses the part that matters, which is how the cells are arranged relative to each other. Dickinson's whole company is built on the wager that researchers will pay for the missing dimension, and so far the early-access program sold out before the machine even shipped.
He did not invent the underlying science. That came out of two academic labs - Karl Deisseroth's at Stanford and Xiao Wang's at MIT and the Broad Institute - and it has a suitably grand name, STARmap, for Spatially-resolved Transcript Amplicon Readout mapping. Dickinson's job is the other half of the problem, the half that kills most biotech: turning a technique that works in a professor's hands into a box that works in a customer's lab.
“ Spatial biology has quickly established itself as one of the most exciting biological technologies of this decade.— Todd Dickinson, on the field he bet his company on
Dickinson's résumé reads like a tour of the companies that built modern genomics instrumentation, but it starts somewhere odder. As an undergraduate at St. Olaf College he took dual degrees in chemistry and theology - a combination that is either a great cocktail-party fact or a quiet hint that he likes systems big enough to argue about. He then went to Tufts University for a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry, under Professor David Walt.
That advisor choice turned out to matter enormously. Walt co-founded Illumina, the company that would go on to dominate DNA sequencing. When Dickinson joined Illumina early in his career, he was, in effect, walking into the commercial future of the field his advisor helped start. He spent more than a decade there, in technical and commercial executive roles, watching a scientific idea become an industry.
From Illumina he went to Bionano Genomics, where he led the development and commercialization of the Irys nanochannel array - an instrument for reading the large-scale structure of genomes. Then he moved into the chief-executive chair, and stayed there. He ran Dovetail Genomics. He ran Arc Bio. In 2022 he merged the two into a single company, Cantata Bio, which is the kind of move that either simplifies a portfolio or quietly admits that two mid-size genomics startups are stronger as one.
The pattern across all of it is consistent, and it is not the pattern of a bench scientist who stumbled into management. Dickinson is a commercializer. His skill is the unglamorous middle distance between a paper in Science and a purchase order - pricing, packaging, manufacturing, and convincing a skeptical lab that the new box is worth the disruption. Stellaromics describes him, in the flat language of a team page, as a "mission-driven, product-focused company builder." The three words doing the work there are "product" and "company builder."
Undergraduate degrees - chemistry and theology, both from St. Olaf College.
Years at Illumina during its rise to global leadership in DNA sequencing.
Companies led as CEO before Stellaromics: Dovetail, Arc Bio, and the merged Cantata Bio.
PhD advisor, David Walt, who happened to co-found Illumina.
Joins Illumina and spends over a decade in technical and commercial executive roles as it becomes the global leader in DNA sequencing.
Leads development and commercialization of Bionano Genomics' Irys nanochannel array system.
Serves as CEO of Dovetail Genomics and, separately, CEO of Arc Bio.
Merges Dovetail Genomics and Arc Bio into Cantata Bio. In the same year, Stellaromics is founded out of the Deisseroth and Wang labs.
Appointed President & CEO of Stellaromics; the company closes a $25M Series A led by Plaisance Capital Management.
Raises $80M Series B led by Catalyst4 with Stanford University Ventures, and unveils the Pyxa platform at the AGBT conference.
Pyxa early-access program is fully subscribed; commercial shipments slated for the end of the year.
Conventional spatial biology works on slices roughly the thickness of a single cell. Pyxa works on tissue blocks that are far thicker, imaging them volumetrically and reading hundreds of molecular targets at subcellular resolution. The number Stellaromics keeps repeating is that it handles samples 10 to 40 times thicker than the 2D standard.
The technology lineage is STARmap and its sibling RIBOmap, which reads protein synthesis rather than just gene transcription - the difference between knowing a cell has a recipe and knowing it is actually cooking. The underlying work has been published in Science, Nature, and Cell.
Relative tissue thickness Pyxa can image, versus conventional 2D spatial methods. Source: Stellaromics.
"We are excited to introduce Pyxa, a 3D profiling technology platform that will redefine the boundaries of spatial biology."
"Stellaromics emerged from a clear need in the scientific community - moving beyond the limitations of 2D spatial biology."
"By providing a true three-dimensional multiomic representation of biological systems, Pyxa will empower researchers to make breakthrough discoveries."
"Every day at Stellaromics is exciting and different, and I truly relish working alongside such a talented team."
Ask Dickinson for his best moment at Stellaromics and he does not point at the $80 million. He points at a conference. Unveiling Pyxa at AGBT - the big genomics-technology gathering on Marco Island - and watching early adopters get visibly excited about what the platform could do to their fields is the thing he singles out. For a career commercializer, that tracks: the moment a skeptical scientist leans in is the moment the product becomes real.
The other detail worth keeping is the theology degree. It is easy to file under trivia, but it is a genuinely unusual starting point for someone who spent the next twenty years selling scientific instruments. Somewhere between the seminary reading list and the nanochannel arrays, he found the through-line.
Pyxa's early-access program was fully subscribed ahead of any commercial delivery.
The core science traces to Karl Deisseroth, the Stanford optogenetics pioneer, and MIT's Xiao Wang.
Competes with 10x Genomics, Bruker, and Akoya - all of whom largely work in 2D.
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.
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