"We're going away from a technique that just makes beautiful images to something that is quantitative, and hopefully down the line something that becomes predictive."
-Thomas Topilko, Vibraint
Meet Thomas Topilko
Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Vibraint ApS
Thomas Topilko is a co-founder and the scientific lead at Vibraint ApS (Virtual Brain Technologies), the Copenhagen-based preclinical contract research organization specializing in whole brain imaging for neuroscience. As one of three scientist founders, he drives the biology and scientific strategy behind the company.
A neuroscientist by training, Thomas was educated in France, where early work in developmental biology shaped his intuition for how living systems are organized in three dimensions. His PhD examined how the adult brain reorganizes during parenthood. It was during his masters and PhD that he first encountered tissue clearing and light sheet microscopy, methods that image an entire organ intact rather than reconstructing it from thin slices, and he became, in his own words, completely obsessed with the technique.
After moving to Denmark, Thomas applied these tools to pharmacological questions at the biotech company Gubra and later the pharmaceutical company Lundbeck. This path shaped his conviction that the real value lies in building the analytical infrastructure that turns dense, terabyte-scale brain data into quantitative, and one day predictive, insight. His long-term vision is to achieve the molecular depth of spatial transcriptomics and proteomics, in full 3D, across the whole brain.