Stilla Technologies Co-Founder and Entrepreneur Remi Dangla, PhD is the featured CEO of the Illumina Ventures Spotlight Series for April. Stilla Technologies emerged in 2013 with the mission to build a disruptive digital PCR solution, using the microfluidic technologies Dangla helped establish. The result has been the development of the Nio™ Digital PCR instrument now commercially available in three configurations. In this 3-minute read Dangla discusses what inspired him to create Stilla Technologies, why the pace of innovation is so vital, and how the recent announcement of a partnership with Bio-Rad could accelerate Stilla’s growth worldwide.


What is your origin story? What led you to create Stilla Technologies?


Remi Dangla:

I started the company after inventing the core technology during my PhD in the lab in France. I'm more of a physicist, but during my PhD I invented a unique way to do microfluidics and I realized that there were a lot of applications in the field of life sciences and genomics. It forced me to ask the question, ‘What could the technology do and what problems could it solve?’ And that's when I discovered the fascinating world of genomics, of sequencing, PCR, and I stumbled upon digital PCR. It was an emerging technology back in 2010 and I figured out that the technologies I held in my hand were actually very, very useful to make digital PCR accessible, much more accessible than it was then. And so, it clicked, and I decided that I would start the company to build a new digital PCR platform, make high precision genetic testing accessible to all labs, doing genomics worldwide, and launched the company in 2013.


What type of impact do you believe Stilla Technologies will have on healthcare?


Remi Dangla:

Stilla’s mission has always been to provide tools for high precision genetic testing for researchers and clinicians to improve healthcare. Where I see our technology making the biggest impact in the next five years is probably in two fields.

The first is oncology in the field of liquid biopsy and precision medicine. Digital PCR can address some of the challenges that are present today in liquid biopsy. Testing most often requires NGS and while NGS is a great technology, it's still heavily centralized in terms of modality. Digital PCR can provide similar answers, but in a much more distributed fashion.

The second is in the field of cell and gene therapy. When you develop a novel, gene therapy or cell therapy for a patient, there is also a ton of testing that needs to be done. You really want to make sure that what you're going to give the patient is really what you meant to manufacture. The quality control is extensive and has to be very precise. We believe our technology will enable the field of cell and gene therapy to expand and to make it safe and valuable for patients.


How does Stilla stand out from the competition? In other words, what is your superpower?


Remi Dangla:

One area where we definitely excel at Stilla is the speed at which we've developed our products. We've brought to market three generations of our digital PCR platform and every time we raised the bar in terms of capability for our customers in terms of user experience and ease of use. This is especially important in the last three years, we have developed our next generation product, Nio, in record time. We received customer feedback, and then we set a goal for the company and in just three years we executed to deliver the quality product. So, the pace of innovation is definitely one key aspect of what we do at Stilla. That kind of spirit has helped the company on multiple occasions to find a way to pivot, to do something different, to make sure that we can secure existence for us in the future.


What type of opportunities are available by being part of the Illumina Ventures portfolio?


Remi Dangla:

It was absolutely essential that we had an investor that could help us and guide us addressing the US market. We come out of France and the U.S. is our biggest market and also a challenge when you're a foreign company. Having Illumina Ventures and people who have driven their own companies, and sold products for Life Sciences companies, was very, very useful to know how to navigate the markets, and what to expect. I don’t think we would have succeeded in the US, if we didn't have board members from Illumina Ventures helping us.


It was recently announced that Bio-Rad would be acquiring Stilla Technologies. How do you envision that impacting Stilla?


Remi Dangla:

The key issue that will be addressed is brand awareness. We're at a point today where we have the right products for a market that exists. We know the market opportunity is there. But we also know we must scale our sales and marketing and it's going to take a lot of energy, money, and more time. Partnering with Bio-Rad, which already has strong footing, will increase our exposure by a hundredfold, not just in the U.S. but worldwide. We seek to get our products into the hands of as many customers as possible because we believe it will enable them to make an impact. Working with Bio-Rad is going to accelerate that dramatically.