“We’re going to be rewriting the textbooks on how tissues work.”
In this compelling reunion with spatial biology pioneer Joe Beechem and a first-time visit from Oliver Braubach, we explore the rapid evolution of spatial technologies at Bruker, a legacy instrumentation company newly resurgent in the spatial space. Following Bruker’s acquisition of Nanostring and Canopy, the company has emerged as a unifying platform where whole-transcriptome discovery meets translational assay development—under one roof.
0:00 Red alert: we don’t yet understand how tissue biology works, and don’t let anyone tell you we do.
5:12 Customer of spatial turned toolmaker
10:00 What do you want researchers to know about Bruker Spatial?
14:24 How do you go from discovery to assay?
18:09 How has AI impacted spatial?
22:41 The ongoing question of reductionism
31:00 What’s your biggest challenge?
Beechem, known for launching the first high-plex spatial platform at Nanostring, returns to Mendelspod to declare that spatial biology may be more consequential than genomics itself. “If somebody tells you they understand how tissue biology works, you can just cut them off. They don’t,” he says, describing the dramatic leaps from 84-plex in 2019 to 20,000-plex subcellular imaging today.
Braubach, a neuroscientist turned toolmaker, shares his journey from early customer to R&D leader, developing user-friendly platforms that empower researchers with flexibility and speed. “We want researchers to assume again a degree of power over their assays,” he says, outlining Bruker Spatial’s mission to integrate discovery and translation.
Together, the two leaders discuss how AI is accelerating the power of spatial, with foundational models that can identify patterns humans can’t. Beechem recounts feeding high-plex images into a GPT model: “It came back and told me where to look. And it was right.”
They also reflect on the philosophical shift spatial enables—moving beyond genomics' reductionist lens toward a more holistic view of biology in situ. “The hype around spatial is not hype,” says Beechem. “It’s real.”
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