Looking at Live Cells and How They Interact at Scale: Mostafa Ronaghi on The Long Run

Mostafa Ronaghi is today’s guest on The Long Run.

He is the co-founder and an executive board member at Foster City, Calif.-based Cellanome.

Mostafa Ronaghi, co-founder and executive board member, Cellanome

Mostafa is a molecular biologist and technology developer. He is an inventor of pyrosequencing methods for DNA sequencing, and is best known for his work as chief technology officer at Illumina during its glory days from 2008-2021.

If the early part of his career was about developing technologies to help us sequence more and more genomes that shed light on health and disease, the current chapter is about moving beyond the underlying DNA code. This is about capturing large sets of data from cells, the fundamental unit where the instructions of life play out. Cellanome is developing technology to study live cells at scale, helping biologists understand how cells behave differently in reaction to certain stimuli. The idea is to do this with the fine-grain resolution of single cells, but at high-speed and high volume.

The company has been operating quietly for the past four years, and has recently begun talking a bit more publicly about what it’s doing at scientific conferences. Cellanome raised $150 million in a Series B financing in January 2024.  

In this conversation, we cover Mostafa’s early life growing in Iran during war time. He left to get his scientific training in Sweden and got early exposure to the slow, hands-on methods of Sanger sequencing before tools of automation became widely available. He has clearly overcome some big obstacles in life, and is undaunted by the challenge of scaling up cell biology way beyond where it has been in the past.  

Please join me and Mostafa Ronaghi on The Long Run.