fda-authorization
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Martin Cannon
Martin Cannon is the founder and former president and CEO of Hemanext, the Lexington, Massachusetts company that turned an unproven idea - storing blood with the oxygen taken out - into an FDA-authorized, CE-marked medical device. Starting in the late 1990s with intellectual property licensed from Los Alamos National Laboratory and a handful of employees, he spent more than two decades building Hemanext into a recognized name in red blood cell transfusion, raising over $150 million in equity and NIH funding and securing more than 200 patents along the way. He retired in September 2023, handing the CEO role to longtime CTO Andrew Dunham, and now advises early-stage companies and mentors entrepreneurs.
Connie Lehman
Connie Lehman is a radiologist who spent three decades reading mammograms and decided the picture could tell a different story. As founder and CEO of Boston-based Clairity, she built the first FDA-authorized AI platform that reads a routine screening mammogram and estimates a woman's five-year risk of developing breast cancer, spotting tissue patterns invisible to the human eye. A Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School with more than 300 peer-reviewed publications, she left a celebrated academic career to commercialize the idea that imaging should predict cancer, not just find it. TIME named her to its 2026 TIME100 Health list and Forbes to its 50 Over 50: Innovation list.