Cytovale is a San Francisco-based medical diagnostics company that built IntelliSep, an FDA-cleared blood test that helps emergency departments identify patients at risk of sepsis in about eight minutes. Instead of hunting for a pathogen, the test reads the immune response by measuring the biomechanical properties of white blood cells using microfluidic deformability cytometry, high-speed imaging and machine learning. Founded on academic research that began in 2007 and incorporated in 2013, the company is applying its rapid host-response platform to one of medicine's most time-sensitive and deadly conditions.
Tim Sweeney is the co-founder and CEO of Inflammatix, a Sunnyvale molecular diagnostics company that reads the immune system instead of hunting for pathogens. A surgeon-turned-entrepreneur with an MD/PhD from Duke and a biomedical informatics background from Stanford, he built TriVerity, an FDA-cleared rapid blood test that measures 29 immune-response genes and uses machine learning to score the likelihood of bacterial infection, viral infection, and severe illness. He has raised more than $200 million to bring precision medicine to sepsis and critical care.