About Inflammatix
Inflammatix is a molecular diagnostics company developing rapid tests that read the immune system to resolve major clinical and public health challenges. Our expert bioinformatics and assay development teams are poised to build a host response-based diagnostics pipeline that includes tests for tropical infections, autoimmune diseases, transplant rejection and other conditions. We are initially focused on developing tests for acute bacterial and viral infections, and sepsis based on patent-pending biomarkers exclusively licensed from Stanford University.
Our Approach
Our approach to developing host response-based diagnostic tests has yielded remarkable results to date:
Every test should be built with a physician end-user in mind. Our team is physician-led, ensuring that development starts with the question of whether a test could be clinically actionable, and whether it fits into workflow. Our test for sepsis was built to answer a critical clinical gap: physicians usually guess about whether or not a patient needs antibiotics. Current pathogen-focused diagnostic methods fail to answer this question because they frequently miss infections that haven’t spread to the bloodstream. Thus, we focused on using the immune response to infections to answer to key clinical action items in the evaluation of an acutely ill patient: (1) does the patient need antibiotics, and (2) what level of care is required? These questions are best answered by ‘reading’ the immune response, rather than looking directly for a pathogen as a ‘needle in a haystack’.
Embrace “dirty data” in selecting and analyzing cohorts to study. Acute infections can be remarkably clinically diverse: kids and adults, inpatients and outpatients, in different settings around the world. We wanted to build a test that would work in every environment. We thus embrace this clinical heterogeneity by analyzing multiple cohorts that are diverse in their population, sample types, assays used and other factors. Our robust statistical pipeline allows us to find reproducible signal in the ‘noise’ of multiple datasets. Although this is a hard challenge, our discovery methods ensure that the diagnostics we find are generalizable to new populations.
Validate on multiple, independent and diverse cohorts. Trustworthy tests must demonstrate robust performance in independent, blinded multi-center studies.
Leadership
After completing his MD/PhD at Duke University, he was a surgery resident at Stanford for 4 years. 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.
He 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, 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.
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, is vice president of informatics 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.
Dr. He leads the Computational Biology department 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 is passionate about paradigm-shifting diagnostics and their ability to transform patient care. She joined Inflammatix in 2020 as VP of Marketing, with key responsibilities related to successfully launching Inflammatix’s flagship test, InSep, and further developing the pipeline. Prior to joining Inflammatix, Nina held Strategic Marketing & Innovation leadership roles in Abbott and Becton Dickinson, encompassing point of care tests, molecular diagnostics, and genomics. She started off her career in the management consulting arm of the healthcare investment bank Leerink Partners. Dr. Menezes has a Ph.D. in Medical Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed her postdoctoral training at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Previously V.P. of Program, Quality and Compliance Management at Pathwork Diagnostics, she has contributed to the development and commercialization of numerous products to benefit biomedical research and healthcare through leadership positions in Project Management at Grail, Depomed, Complete Genomics, Pathwork Diagnostics, Applied Biosystems, Affymetrix, Inc. and Chiron (Nucleic Acid Diagnostics Division). She has also held management positions in Project Portfolio Management (Roche Molecular Systems) and Product Development, Clinical Affairs, Product Support and Project Management (Syva Company).
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.
Prior to joining Inflammatix, Dr. Liu was the Research Leader at Roche Molecular Systems, developing molecular diagnostic tests on infectious disease. Dr. Xiaowen Liu received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from SUNY-Binghamton. She completed her postdoctoral training at Cornell University.
Dr. Rawling brings 15 years of experience in biochemistry and molecular biology research to the development of novel methods for RNA isolation and quantitation of host response biomarkers. Prior to joining Inflammatix, Dr. Rawling worked at Cepheid developing ctDNA assays for applications in oncology. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University.
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.
Chris worked with Inflammatix as an investor in 2018 and joined full-time in 2020 to lead various strategic initiatives. Previously, Chris worked at Northpond Ventures, where he invested in early-stage life sciences and healthcare companies. His prior experience includes leading consulting engagements at Health Advances and performing engineering analysis at Exponent.
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).
Staff
Board of Directors
After completing his MD/PhD at Duke University, he was a surgery resident at Stanford for 4 years. 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.
Bio coming soon.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. Contact us at info@inflammatix.com to explore collaboration opportunities.
Awards
Inflammatix is recognized for our accomplishments and promise
2017 ISF Best Clinical Abstract Award
2019 AACC Disruptive Technology and Audience Choice Awards
2019 FierceMedTech Fierce 15 Company
2020 MedTech Innovator Top 50 Medtech Startups