About Inflammatix

our mission

Inflammatix is on a bold mission to help bring about a new era in emergency and critical care.

Our tests decode the body’s host immune response to reveal new insights, once thought beyond reach, for conditions like pneumonia and sepsis. Just like testing for troponin helped to redefine care for heart attacks, our molecular diagnostics will give healthcare providers the clarity they need to make faster, better decisions. Inflammatix is setting the stage for better patient outcomes and more resilient health systems—building a future where urgent and critical care is as responsive and effective as can be.

Precision medicine on demand

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 initially developed TriVerity, a test for emergency department patients suspected of acute infection or sepsis using patent-pending immune response-based biomarkers exclusively licensed from Stanford University.

Leadership

Tim Sweeney, MD, PhD

Co-Founder and CEO

Jonathan Romanowsky

Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer

Purvesh Khatri, PhD

Co-Founder and Chief Scientist

Jamie Lewis

Chief Commercial Officer

Joao Fonseca, PhD

Chief Technology Officer

Sam Ajizian, MD

Chief Medical Officer

Mario Torres

Interim Chief Financial Officer

Martín Vazquez

Chief Operating Officer

Christopher MacGriff, PhD

Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development

Diana Lane

Vice President of Quality Assurance and Regulatory Affairs

Ljubomir Buturovic, PhD

Vice President of Machine Learning

Paul Fleming, PhD

Vice President of Engineering and Program Management

Tawny Darling

Vice President of People Operations

Kulwant Sandhu

Vice President, Integrated Supply Chain

Board of Directors

Lucy Coassin

Director, Northpond Ventures

Heiner Dreismann, PhD

Former CEO, Roche Molecular Systems

Florian Kainzinger, PhD
Founder, Think.Health Ventures

David Persing, MD, PhD

EVP/Chief Medical Officer, Cepheid

Jonathan Romanowsky

Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer

Tim Sweeney, MD, PhD

Co-Founder and CEO

Steve Tablak

Former Chairman and CEO, GeneWeave

Board of Advisors

Laura L. Adams

Special Advisor at the National Academy of Medicine (NAM)

Jim Ducharme

Clinical Professor of Medicine

Oliver Liesenfeld

Retired CMO, Infectious Diseases and Diagnostic Devices

In Memorium

In memory of valued mentors and close friends

Hector Wong, MD

Professor and Scientific Advisor

Atul Butte, M.D., Ph.D.

Professor and Mentor

Investors

Inflammatix investors include the following groups:

Partner with Us!

Inflammatix is establishing partnerships with diagnostic instrument, companion therapeutic and commercial distribution companies across the globe. Connect with us at info[at]inflammatix.com to explore collaboration opportunities.

Partners include NIH, DRIVe, BARDA and DARPA.

Inflammatix projects have been funded in whole or in part with federal funds from the Department of Health and Human Services; Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response; Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, under Contract No. 75A50119C00034.

Atul Butte, M.D., Ph.D.

Atul Butte, M.D., Ph.D., was a researcher, startup founder and prominent voice on the use of biomedical data and AI in healthcare. He was a professor at the UCSF, where he served as the inaugural director of its Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute as well as the chief data scientist for the broader University of California Health System. Among several accolades, he was recognized as a Open Science Champion for Change in 2013, was an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine in 2015 and was elected as a fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology in 2021. Atul was a visionary scientist, educator, and leader whose work fundamentally reshaped biomedical research and health care.

Lucy Coassin

Lucy Coassin is a Director at Northpond Ventures. She is a board director at Hawthorne Health, Octave Bioscience, SimBioSys, Story Health, and Vital Biosciences, and a board observer at Faro Health, Triumvira, Vizgen, and Slingshot Biosciences. Previously, Lucy was Head of Pharma at Current Health (a Northpond portfolio company, acquired by Best Buy). She has 15 years of experience commercializing technology from product launch to widespread adoption. Lucy has held business development and commercial roles at digital health and life science tool companies including Science 37 (NASDAQ: SNCE), Farcast Biosciences, Genentech, and Life Technologies (Acquired by ThermoFisher, NYSE: TMO). Lucy received her MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a B.S. with distinction in Chemistry from Duke University.

Hector Wong, MD

Dr. Hector R. Wong was a Professor of Pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. He also served 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 was focused on sepsis, and spanned the spectrum from laboratory-based research to translational research. A major focus of the program was the development of stratification, prognostic, and diagnostic biomarkers.

Oliver Liesenfeld, MD

Dr. Liesenfeld is an expert in the field of microbiology, infectious diseases and the host response. He has over 25 years of industry and academic experience in the diagnostics field, with a focus on molecular diagnostics and infectious diseases. He led Inflammatix’s clinical and scientific affairs teams as its chief medical officer from Jan 2018 to June 2024. Prior to his role at Inflammatix, 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.

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.

Laura L. Adams

Laura Adams, Special Advisor at the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), provides leadership for the NAM Digital Health and Evidence Mobilization portfolios of the Leadership Consortium. She has expertise in biotechnology, health care innovation, and human-centered care. She serves on the board of Translational Medicine Accelerator (TMA), a Boston-based precision medicine company focusing on patients with recalcitrant and rare diseases; and the Oversight Council for the MA Center for Health Information and Analysis.

Previously, Laura was the founding President and CEO of the Rhode Island Quality Institute (RIQI), RI’s statewide Health Information Exchange. During her time at RIQI, Health Data Management named her one of their 2018 Most Powerful Women in Health IT in the Thought Leader category and Becker’s Hospital Review named her to the 2018 inaugural list of Female Health IT Leaders to Know and to its 2019 list of Women in Health IT to Know. As Catalyst at X4 Health, Laura led the national strategic partnerships for the 3rd Conversation (3C) project (https://www.3rdconversation.org/), helping to reweave humanity into the fabric of healthcare and healing.
Laura chaired the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) Planning Committee for the “Digital Infrastructure for Population Health and a Learning Healthcare System” initiative. Through her Laura Adams Consulting company, she has delivered conference keynotes in nearly every state in the union and in 13 different countries.

Laura was Founder, President and CEO of Decision Support Systems, a New York-based company specializing in Internet-based healthcare decision support. She has been a long-time faculty member of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) in Boston. She directed the IHI Idealized Design of the Intensive Care Unit project and served as faculty in the VHA’s ICU improvement collaborative and was the Principal Investigator on the RI Statewide ICU Collaborative. She was among the first to bring the principles of healthcare QI to the Middle East, in conjunction with Donald Berwick, MD and the Harvard Institute for Social and Economic Policy in the Middle East. She served as IHI faculty at the inaugural IHI Middle East Forum on Quality Improvement in Healthcare in Doha, Qatar.

Under her leadership, RIQI won the National Council for Community Behavioral Health Excellence Award for Impact in serving those with behavioral health and substance abuse challenges. She received citations from the RI Congressional delegation for her visionary leadership and contributions to improving the healthcare system in Rhode Island. Laura’s company was a multi-year winner of the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce’s Exemplary award for Worksite Wellness. RIQI was named RI’s Most Innovative Company in Healthcare in 2015; was named 2017 Employer of Choice by the Employer’s Association of New England; and was a multi-year winner of RI’s Best Places to Work award from the Providence Business News. RIQI won the 2017 Innovation Award in Healthcare in Rhode Island; a national 2018 Healthcare Informatics Innovation Award for impact on the opioid crisis; and was a top finalist for the 2018 New England Business Innovation award, again for impact on the opioid crisis.

Steve Tablak

Mr. Tablak joined GeneWeave with a great idea for a transformative IVD and helped to build a great company.

Ingo Chakravarty

Ingo Chakravarty is an Operating Partner at Northpond Ventures. He has 30 years of experience in building, scaling and leading high-performance teams and companies in the diagnostics and precision medicine sectors. Ingo was recently President and CEO of Mesa, which he successfully sold to Thermo Fisher Scientific in 2021. Prior to Mesa, Ingo held multiple executive roles in the diagnostics and precision medicine sectors, including CEO of Navican Genomics, SVP and GM of GenMark Diagnostics, (acquired by Roche), VP and GM of Gen-Probe (acquired by Hologic), and various leadership roles at Ventana Medical Systems (acquired by Roche). He received a degree in electrical engineering from the Friedrich Heacker School in Germany.

Heiner Dreismann, PhD

Dr. Dreismann, is a seasoned executive with more than 35 years of experience in the life sciences and health care industries and is regarded as a pioneer in the early adoption of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique, one of the most ubiquitous technologies in molecular biology and genetics research today. He earned a master of science degree in biology and his doctor of philosophy degree in microbiology/molecular biology (summa cum laude) from Westfaelische Wilhelms University in Muenster, Germany. Heiner holds a post-doctoral fellowship at the French Center for Nuclear Research in Saclay, near Paris, France and then joined the biotechnology company Roehm and Haas in Darmstadt, Germany.

He joined F. Hoffmann La Roche AG in 1985, and held various national and international management positions. After Roche’s acquisition of PCR technology in 1991, Dr. Dreismann led the PCR Business Unit for Europe and was the head of the strategic planning for PCR diagnostics. From 2000 to 2006 he was President and CEO of Roche Molecular Systems. Dr. Dreismann currently serves on the boards of several public and private life sciences and health care companies in the United States, Europe and Israel.

Florian Kainzinger, PhD

Florian Kainzinger serves as a Managing Partner and the Founder of Think.Health Ventures since 2015. Before joining Think.Health Ventures, Mr. Kainzinger has been Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Labor Berlin between 2011 and 2015, the joint diagnostic organization of the Charité – university medical center and the Vivantes Network for Health Group with more than 400 employees on 12 sites in Berlin. Labor Berlin currently is the largest hospital-connected laboratory network in Europe – with more than 25,000 hospital beds being served by its lab organization.

Prior to Labor Berlin, Mr. Kainzinger worked at Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, a strategic consulting firm serving European healthcare clients. He holds a master’s degree from the University of Munich (Dipl.-Kfm.) and a Ph.D. in health economics from the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin.

David H. Persing, MD, PhD

David (Dave) Persing, MD, Ph.D., is Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer at Cepheid. He has spent most of his career in biomarker discovery, translational medicine, and innovation in the diagnostics space.

Dave joined Cepheid in 2005 where he developed an industry-leading portfolio of products focused on the enablement of molecular diagnostic technology to meet global challenges in infectious diseases and oncology. From 2017-23, after the acquisition of Cepheid by Danaher, he was appointed to the role of Chief Scientific Officer for the Danaher Diagnostics platform. Dave conducted his scientific and medical training with Don Ganem and Nobel laureate Harold Varmus at the University of California, San Francisco, and obtained his MD and PhD degrees in 1988. After residency training in Laboratory Medicine at Yale, he held leadership roles in academia and industry starting in the early 1990s with the design, implementation, and scaleup of the first PCR reference laboratory at the Mayo Clinic.

His interest in the democratization of molecular diagnostic methods has been longstanding, starting in 1993 with his publication of the first of five widely adopted textbooks to include PCR protocols and guidelines for laboratory operations. He has published over 300 peer-reviewed articles and reviews, including several high impact publications in the New England Journal of Medicine, Science, and PNAS. In 2020, he was named to the Fierce Pharma list of the most influential scientists in the fight against COVID-19. To help maintain a connection with the latest trends in translational medicine, Dave also serves as Consulting Professor of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Kulwant Sandhu

Kulwant Sandhu, MBA, is the Vice President of Integrated Supply Chain at Inflammatix, where she leads global supply chain strategy, architecture optimization, manufacturing operations, and logistics to support the company’s growth and commercialization efforts. She brings over 20 years of experience in building and scaling supply chain functions across the medical device class I and Class III, energy, and high-tech industries.

Before joining Inflammatix, Kulwant served as Vice President of Supply Chain at Outset Medical, where she established and optimized the company’s global supply chain, overseeing a network of 200+ suppliers, enabling rapid commercialization and instrumental in company going public. Prior to that, she held leadership roles at organizations including Abbott(through acquisition of Thoratec), Miasole, and Maxtor, where she spearheaded commercialization initiatives in procurement, contract manufacturing, and operational efficiency at scale.

Kulwant is passionate about driving supply chain resilience, fostering strategic supplier partnerships, and leveraging innovation to enhance operational excellence. She holds an MBA from University of Phoenix and a Bachelor’s & Master’s degree from Punjab University.

Tawny Darling

Tawny Darling serves as VP, People Operations for Inflammatix. In her role, Ms. Darling is responsible for leading Inflammatix’s overall human resources strategy, global talent acquisition, leadership development, diversity & inclusion, career development, comp & benefits, HR operations, and employee relations.

Ms. Darling has over 18 years of experience in human resources and has worked in the finance, tech, and bio tech industries. She received her BS in Business Management from the University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ (go Wildcats!), and her MA in counseling at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, CA (go Gaels!).

Paul Fleming, PhD

Dr. Fleming leads the engineering group at Inflammatix which encompasses systems, mechanical, electrical, software, manufacturing, and consumable engineering, as well as human-centered industrial design, digital design, and human factors, and usability engineering. Prior to Inflammatix, he served as the Director of Program Management and Site Operations for the diagnostic group at Ximedica, a product development company, and Chief Scientist at GenCell Biosystems. Dr. Fleming received his Ph.D. from the University of Limerick, Ireland, where his work focused on the development of an instrument for high throughput gene expression analysis directly from cells.

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.

Diana Lane

Diana Lane is a graduate of the University of California Santa Cruz with a Bachelor’s in Biology. She has worked in Quality Assurance supporting medical device and IVD development and manufacturing since 1989. 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 Management and Regulatory Affairs at Roche.

Martín Vazquez

Martín Vazquez is a seasoned Med-Tech Executive with nearly three decades of progressive experience in scaling global supply chains, driving profitable growth, and accelerating technology-based innovation in highly regulated medical device environments.

He brings a solid track record in manufacturing strategy planning and execution with a focus on implementing agile, resilient and cost-effective supply chain networks for complex electromechanical devices as well as high volume consumables.

Most recently Martín served as Chief Operating Officer of Outset Medical where he led the rapid scaling of the supply chain, quality, manufacturing and engineering functions and was part of the C-level team that took the company public in Sep 2020. Previously he was Vice President Operations North America at Abbott Rapid Dx (formerly Alere) and WW Vice President, Manufacturing Management at Becton Dickinson. Martín holds a BS in Industrial Engineering from the University of Texas El Paso and an EMBA from USC Marshall School of Business.

Christopher MacGriff, PhD

Dr. MacGriff serves as Inflammatix’s strategy lead, with a focus on early pipeline ideation and business development partnerships. Previously he was an investor at Northpond Ventures, where his portfolio of businesses included Inflammatix, Intabio (acquired by SCIEX), IsoPlexis (acquired by Berkely Lights), Isolation Bio, and Deep Lens (acquired by Paradigm). Prior to Northpond, he worked in strategy consulting at Health Advances, where he advised clients in the healthcare and life sciences industries. He received a PhD in electrical engineering from Arizona State University and a BS in physics from Georgetown University.

Mario Torres

Mario Torres has more than 15 years of experience in the Diagnostic device industry and leadership experience in the Molecular diagnostics testing market. Mr. Torres previous roles have included the President and Head of the Roche Molecular Diagnostics Unit deploying PCR’s testing solutions to navigate and support the COVID pandemic challenges. He has held the CFO position for the integrated Roche Molecular Solutions business (Sequencing, Tissue and Molecular Diagnostics units) helping to grow the business and completing several acquisition and integration transactions. His experience also extends to the pharmaceutical industry at F. Hoffmann-La Roche for more than 12 years supporting regions and affiliates in Finance and Operational roles at various locations in Europe, Asia and Central America.

Mr. Torres holds a B.Eng. in Computer Science and a Masters in IT for business from the University of the Andes.

Sam Ajizian, MD

Dr. Sam Ajizian comes to Inflammatix as Chief Medical Officer after nearly 10 years at Medtronic, serving in CMO roles in the Acute Care & Monitoring businesses. He oversaw a $2Bn GAR global business serving over 115 million patients a year in over 70 countries. Sam served as the medical leader for business development and licensing activities, finding targets and bringing together cross functional teams to create agile and productive inorganic enhancements to the portfolio. He’s also a proven global leader in the medical device community, engaging key medical societies worldwide and driving adoption of products through research, guidelines, and education. He is a commercially facing CMO, energized by customers and how to best meet their needs leveraging the C suite with defined focus and production.

Joao Fonseca, PhD

Dr. Fonseca has over 15 years of experience in developing and launching breakthrough point of care diagnostic products. 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.

Jamie Lewis

Jamie Lewis, a seasoned commercial executive, leads Inflammatix’s commercial organization. With over 20 years in medical devices and software, she played a key role in Outset Medical’s IPO and held leadership positions at Intuitive Surgical during its rapid growth phase. Jamie also co-founded Matter Solutions, a platform enabling virtual mental and behavioral healthcare. She graduated from The Ohio State University, where she was a four-year starter and team captain for the basketball team, later becoming the first Ohio State player drafted by the WNBA’s Washington Mystics.

Purvesh Khatri, PhD

Dr. Khatri possesses more than 15 years of experience in bioinformatics, computational biology, and translational medicine. He is well-known for his work on ontological and pathway analysis of high-throughput molecular, genomics, and proteomics data. Dr. Khatri developed the first ontology tool for analysis of microarray data, named Onto-Express, and has expanded into a suite of web-based open access tools, Onto-Tools.

His most recent work focused on developing computational methods for integrated, multi-cohort analysis of publicly available data to increase sample size, as well as better account for the heterogeneity observed in real world patient populations. Using these methods, he has identified highly specific and sensitive biomarkers for: (1) infectious diseases (sepsis, respiratory infections, tuberculosis), (2) acute solid-organ transplant rejection, and (3) cancer (pancreatic cancer, small cell and non-small cell lung cancer, mesothelioma). Dr. Khatri has authored or co-authored more than 140 papers and holds 30-plus patents.

Jonathan Romanowsky

Mr. Romanowsky has over 15 years of novel, high-value molecular diagnostics commercialization experience. 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.

Tim Sweeney, MD, PhD

Dr. Sweeney helped invent the core Inflammatix technology and is a licensed physician and data scientist. He 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.