He chased prions after the mad cow scare. When the epidemic never came, he turned the same science on Parkinson's - and built the first commercial test that catches misfolded proteins before symptoms start.
In the early 2000s, the world braced for an epidemic that never arrived. Mad cow disease had jumped to humans in a handful of terrifying cases, and laboratories raced to build tools that could spot the rogue proteins - prions - responsible for it. Russ Lebovitz was one of the scientists in that race. The outbreak fizzled. The science did not. That leftover science is now the reason a person can learn what is happening inside their brain years before their hands ever tremble.
Lebovitz is co-founder and CEO of Amprion, a diagnostics company most people have never heard of that has quietly built something the field spent decades wanting: a test that detects misfolded alpha-synuclein, the protein at the center of Parkinson's disease. The test is called SYNTap. In 2019 the FDA granted it a Breakthrough Device Designation. Today it is used in clinics and clinical trials to give patients and researchers a biological answer where there used to be only guesswork.
To understand how he got here, you have to start with a man who did not plan to run a company at all.
Lebovitz holds both an MD and a PhD from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis - a training track that produces people who are equally comfortable at a patient's bedside and at a lab bench. He spent more than fifteen years as a research physician and senior scientist, on the faculty of Baylor College of Medicine at the Texas Medical Center in Houston and at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia.
That is a full career on its own. Most people who reach that point stay. Lebovitz did something less common: as a molecular pathologist, he became convinced that the way we diagnose disease - not just treat it - was the part that needed reinventing. You cannot cure what you cannot see. And when it came to the brain, we were mostly blind.
Around 2007, Lebovitz began working with neuroscientist Dr. Claudio Soto, a biochemist who had developed a way to amplify and detect prions - the misfolded proteins behind Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of mad cow. Their bet was straightforward: build a diagnostic business around prion detection.
Then the feared prion epidemic never materialized. A lot of teams would have folded. Instead, Soto saw something larger hiding in the work. The same mechanism - a normal protein folding into the wrong shape and coaxing its neighbors to do the same - was not unique to rare prion diseases. It appeared to be the engine behind common ones. Amyloid-beta and tau in Alzheimer's. Alpha-synuclein in Parkinson's. By 2013 the team had shown they could detect misfolded amyloid-beta. The company as we know it, Amprion, took shape in 2014.
Lebovitz has a compact way of describing the villain in all of this: "Prions are proteins gone rogue." His larger claim is more provocative - and it is the thesis the whole company rests on.
If that is true, the map of brain disease is far smaller than the tangle of symptoms and syndromes doctors have wrestled with for a century. A small map is a map you can actually navigate.
Breakthroughs make good headlines. The work underneath them rarely does. Amprion's first decade was slow, and the clearest measure of the grind is the clock. The seed amplification test originally took close to two weeks to run. A two-week test is a research curiosity, not a tool a physician can order. The team spent years compressing it - down to roughly twenty hours - which is the difference between a lab experiment and a product.
That patience shows up everywhere in the timeline. A clinical laboratory stood up in 2018. The FDA Breakthrough Device Designation in 2019. Commercial launch of SYNTap in 2021. A CAP-accredited, CLIA-certified lab operational in 2022. None of it happened fast, and Lebovitz seems to regard that as the point rather than the frustration.
There is a reason Lebovitz keeps returning to the word "early." The brain does not heal the way a cut does. Once neurons are lost, they generally stay lost. So the window that matters is the one before the damage - the quiet years when a disease is already present biologically but has not yet announced itself.
That framing also reshapes drug development. A reliable biomarker lets pharmaceutical companies choose the right patients for trials and measure whether a drug is actually moving the underlying biology. Amprion's test has become a tool inside that process, not just a result handed to a patient. As Lebovitz puts it, the goal is not the test for its own sake: "Our ultimate goal is to find a cure for brain diseases. Now that we can accurately detect the biomarker early, we'll make great strides to accelerate research and innovation."
Amprion is, at heart, a two-scientist story. Soto invented the amplification chemistry; Lebovitz, the molecular pathologist, understood what the proteins meant and how to turn a technique into a regulated, commercial diagnostic. It is a pairing of the person who reads the signal and the person who learned to make the signal loud enough to read.
The recognition has followed. In 2024 Amprion won the BioTech Breakthrough Award for Clinical Diagnostics Solution of the Year, and that same year announced the initial close of a $15 million Series B to expand its commercial reach and pour more into R&D. Lebovitz also works as a principal investigator alongside the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation, a sign that his interest runs past any single product toward the broader project of brain health.
What comes through in interview after interview is not hype. It is a physician-scientist who spent two decades on a single, stubborn idea and is finally watching it reach patients. He talks about drugs that could one day stop or slow disease, about detecting the biology "years before we have symptoms," about turning early detection into something close to prevention. For a field that has delivered more disappointment than triumph, that is a notably grounded kind of optimism.
The mad cow epidemic that started all of this never came. The tools built for it did - and in Lebovitz's hands they found a much bigger problem to solve.