Stellaromics Dives into the Thick of Spatial Genomics

2025 has sometimes seemed like an unending dark winter of biotech, but just before AGBT spatial genomics company Stellaromics announced they had secured $80 million in Series B funding to advance their Pyxa platform.  Around that time, CEO Todd Dickinson and CTO Ye Fu chatted with me by phone, which any diligent and responsible scribe would have written up immediately.  Alas, that is not me.  But even two months of delay in writing cannot change the fact that Stellaromics is an interesting new entrant to the spatial genomics field.

Will the Result Be GeneXpertION?

One of the more intriguing and slightly mysterious genomics news stories of last week is Oxford Nanopore announcing a partnership with Danaher's Cepheid business to use Cepheid's GeneXpert system for sample preparation upstream of nanopore sequencing.  The press release was filled with grand visions but few details, which isn't exactly unusual for ONT.   I've often heard of Cepheid but never really dove into the technology, so I've been doing a crash dive on the company's website (which was also a raiding expedition for the images used below) as well as a detailed post Nava made in 2022.  Here's what I have learned and also some speculations about how it might fit with ONT - and if I've misunderstood anything I hope to receive constructive guidance on where I've gone wrong.  Please note I've made a COI disclosure at the bottom of this piece.