OUR MISSION
At Inflammatix, we are reimagining diagnostics
Inflammatix will create and commercialize best-in-class host-response diagnostics to resolve major clinical and public health challenges.
Better patient care is at the core of what we do. We achieve better patient care through our innovative approach to developing diagnostics–our tests read the patient’s immune system to help us understand the cause of infection and the degree of its severity. Armed with this knowledge, the clinician can treat the patient appropriately and within minutes.
There is a critical unmet need for quickly and accurately characterizing infections in patients who are acutely ill. Our expert bioinformatics and assay development teams are building a host response-based diagnostics pipeline that includes tests for acute infection and sepsis, emerging infectious diseases, autoimmune diseases, tropical infections, transplant rejection and other conditions.
We are initially focused on developing tests for acute bacterial infections, viral infections, and sepsis based on patent-pending biomarkers exclusively licensed from Stanford University.

Leadership

Tim Sweeney, MD PhD
Tim completed his MD/PhD at Duke University, and then spent time training in the general surgery residency program at Stanford University. While training as a surgeon, he became frustrated with the current diagnostic tools for infection. During his residency research years, he completed a postdoc MS in Biomedical Informatics, during which he worked with Dr. Khatri to identify a new way to diagnose infections based on ‘reading’ the immune system. Their work designing custom informatics algorithms for sifting through heterogeneous large datasets led to the core technology on which Inflammatix is based.

Jonathan Romanowsky
Jonathan is driven by the incredible impact that diagnostics can provide dedicated healthcare professionals to improve patient care while providing significant value to public and private payers paying for it. He has served in commercial leadership roles at Telomere Diagnostics, Veracyte, CardioDx and CareDx. He has successfully brought product concepts through launch and to achieve standard-of-care status. He has led numerous commercialization efforts in product management, marketing, operations, reimbursement and sales in the United States and abroad. Previously, Jonathan pioneered electronic prescribing at iScribe (now part of CVS) and was a business strategy consultant for Bain & Company. Jonathan earned his Bachelor of Science in Political Economy from the University of California, Berkeley and his MBA from Stanford University, focusing on medical technology innovation.

Oliver Liesenfeld, MD
Oliver Liesenfeld, MD, has over 25 years of industry and academic experience in the diagnostics field, with a focus on molecular diagnostics and infectious diseases. As chief medical officer at Roche Molecular Diagnostics, he built a state-of-the-art medical department and led the company’s clinical science, medical affairs, clinical operations and biometrics functions. His team designed and executed numerous clinical trials to support regulatory approvals and commercialization of the company’s broad product portfolio, including the LightCycler® SeptiFast test for use in sepsis diagnosis. Dr. Liesenfeld previously served as associate professor of Medical Microbiology and Infection Immunology at the Charite Medical School in Berlin, Germany, where his research focused on the immune response to infections. He holds an MD and a doctoral (Dr. med) degree from the Free University of Berlin, Germany and completed his residency in medical microbiology and infection epidemiology at the Charite Medical School, Berlin. He also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine at Stanford University. Dr. Liesenfeld has authored more than 160 articles in peer-reviewed journals and more than 30 book chapters.

Joao Fonseca, PhD
Prior to joining Inflammatix, Joao was the founder and former CEO of Biosurfit where he managed multiple R&D teams in diagnostics, covering the fields of instrumentation & optical detection, microfluidics & automated sample prep, assay development and advanced computational methods to convert raw assay information into precise & accurate clinical results. Joao received a PhD in Physics from the Université Louis Pasteur of Strasbourg.

Ljubomir Buturovic, PhD
Ljubomir is VP of Machine Learning at Inflammatix where his team leverages novel data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence to develop and validate the robust clinical algorithms that power the company’s diagnostic tests. Prior to Inflammatix, Dr. Buturovic was the principal at Clinical Persona, a consulting firm specializing in machine learning algorithm development for the life sciences industry. He previously served as chief scientist at Pathwork Diagnostics, Inc., where he led predictive algorithm development for two FDA-cleared genomics tests for cancer. Prior to that, he was bioinformatics director at Incyte Corporation. He has served as adjunct professor of computer science at San Francisco State University since 2005. Dr. Buturovic received his PhD in electrical engineering from University of Belgrade, Serbia, and did postdoctoral training at Boston University’s BioMolecular Engineering Research Center.

Yudong He, PhD, MBA
Yudong is VP of Computational Biology at Inflammatix, focusing on research for novel multi-gene molecular diagnostic signatures. Prior to Inflammatix, he led Computational Biology/Bioinformatics teams at Amgen and Merck as Scientific Director to advance multiple programs for drug R & D pipeline in areas of target discovery & liability assessment, lead optimization, safety issue resolution & enablement of IND fillings. He was also responsible for developing new platforms and data integration strategies for biomarker identification, mechanism of action elucidation, predictive & translational safety modeling. Prior, at Rosetta Inpharmatics, he pioneered novel algorithms and genomic applications including the 70-gene breast cancer prognosis classifier as basis for the FDA-approved MammaPrint test. He has authored or co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and is inventor of more than 10 US patents. He received his PhD in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley and MBA from the University of Washington Forster School of Business.

Nina Menezes, PhD

Pamela Lambert, MS, PMP, CLS
Pamela is the Interim Head of QA and manages the company’s new product development design assurance, product lifecycle process and government contract reporting. She is a certified Project Management Professional and holds a Total Quality Management Certificate from San Jose State University in addition to her B.S. in Medical Technology from U.N.C. Chapel Hill and her M.S. in Clinical Laboratory Science from U.C. San Francisco.

Paul Fleming, PhD

Howard Solovei
Howard was formerly CFO of Intraop Medical, VP of Finance and Chief Accounting Officer at Lending Club, VP of Finance at Solar Mosaic, and CFO of Phoenix American. In all his startup positions, he developed the corporate forecasts, monthly board packages, and key performance indicators that steered those businesses. At Lending Club, Howard created and released the first 10-Q’s and K’s ever filed by a marketplace lender and initiated their Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. Howard holds a B.S. in Business Administration from UC Berkeley.

Diana Lane
Ms. Lane took a QA Manager role in 2003, and her positions since that time have expanded to include responsibility for Regulatory Affairs. She was most recently Director of Quality Mgmt and Regulatory Affairs at Roche.

Purvesh Khatri, PhD
Dr. Khatri has more than 15 years of professional experience in the areas of bioinformatics, computational biology, and translational medicine. He is well known for work on the development of ontological and pathway analysis of high throughput molecular data, and for the integration and analysis of high throughput genomics and proteomics data. Dr. Khatri developed the first tool, Onto-Express, for analysis of microarray data using Gene Ontology. He expanded his work in ontological analysis to develop a suite of web-based open access tools, Onto-Tools. His recent work is focused on developing computational methods for integrated, multi-cohort analysis of publically available data to increase the sample size as well as better account for heterogeneity observed in real world patient population. Using these methods, he has identified highly specific and sensitive biomarkers for: (1) acute solid-organ transplant rejection, (2) cancers (pancreatic cancer, small cell and non-small cell lung cancer, mesothelioma), and (3) infectious diseases (sepsis, respiratory viral infections, tuberculosis).
Board of Directors

Tim Sweeney, MD PhD
Tim is the founding CEO of Inflammatix.


Michael Rubin, MD, PhD
Michael P. Rubin, M.D., Ph.D. is the founder and CEO of Northpond Ventures, a formative stage venture-capital fund dedicated to science and technology. Dr. Rubin’s active directorships include Mitra Biotech, Selux Diagnostics, NanoView Biosciences, GALT, and DiCE Molecules. Dr. Rubin was previously co-founder and managing partner of Sands Capital Ventures, a global cross industry venture capital business, and affiliate of Sands Capital Management. Under Dr. Rubin’s leadership, SCV invested in dozens of leading startups, resulting in numerous successful businesses and exits. Dr. Rubin became a board certified physician and surgeon, and completed his fellowship training at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Rubin also holds an MBA from The University of Massachusetts Amherst, is a CFA charterholder, earned his medical doctorate at The University of Chicago, and holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from The UCLA Samueli School of Engineering.

Ken Bahk, PhD
Dr. Ken Bahk has spent his career as an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and venture philanthropist for multiple Family Offices. Prior to Lakewood Holdings, Ken was the founding CEO of Three Lakes Partners, has served in key investment, management, and Director roles, and functioned as in leadership positions for a multitude of professional organizations including the American Association for Clinical Chemistry, Association for Molecular Pathology, and the American Society for Microbiology. As a conduit between technology and finance, Ken co-founded and manages the premier Analyst events for molecular diagnostics and microbiology to highlight technologies most likely to be impactful and commercially successful. He received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and an M.S. in Neurobiology and Physiology from Northwestern University, and his M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Management.
Advisors

Jesús Bermejo-Martin, MD, PhD
Dr. Bermejo-Martin was fellow of Clinical Immunology at the Hospital Gregorio Marañón, Madrid, Spain, from 1999 to 2003, and received his PhD in Immunology at University Complutense of Madrid in 2005. In 2006 he was Guest Researcher at the University of Health Network, Toronto, Canada. Currently he is the PI of BioSepsis, focusing on translational research in sepsis, with a particular emphasis in gene expression and systems biology.

Hector Wong, MD
Dr. Hector R. Wong is a Professor of Pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. He also serves as the Director of Critical Care Medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Research Foundation. His research program is focused on sepsis, and spans the spectrum from laboratory-based research to translational research. A major focus of the program is the development of stratification, prognostic, and diagnostic biomarkers.

Nathan A Ledeboer
Dr. Ledeboer is a Professor and Vice Chair of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Clinically, he serves as the Medical Director of Microbiology and Molecular Diagnostics for Froedtert Hospital and Wisconsin Diagnostic Laboratories in Milwaukee, WI. His research endeavors, particularly in the area developing diagnostic tools for infectious diseases, have led to numerous publications in peer-reviewed journals and more than 100 funded research projects.

Jim Ducharme
Dr Ducharme is a Clinical Professor of Medicine at McMaster University, and an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Queens University. He works as an emergency physician at Humber River Hospital in Toronto. Dr. Ducharme is currently the President of the International Federation for Emergency Medicine. Past professional experience includes eleven years as Editor in Chief of the Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine and serving as President for both the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians and the Quebec Association of Emergency Physicians. Dr. Ducharme has also held leadership roles in the private sector, having been Chief Medical Officer at MedEmerg (then AIM Health Group) and McKesson Canada.
Partner with Us!
Inflammatix is establishing partnerships with diagnostic instrument, companion therapeutic and commercial distribution companies across the globe. Contact us at info@inflammatix.com to explore collaboration opportunities.
Awards
Inflammatix is recognized for our accomplishments and promise