infectious-disease
(14)
Merck
KEYTRUDA made Merck an oncology powerhouse. Now the 135-year-old drugmaker is spending, partnering and inventing its way toward a future that cannot depend on one medicine.
Virtue Diagnostics
Virtue Diagnostics is a platform-based in vitro diagnostics (IVD) company headquartered in Singapore, with manufacturing in Suzhou, China and clinical operations in Beijing. Founded in 2019, it develops affordable diagnostic instruments and reagents across chemiluminescence, clinical chemistry, hematology, clinical mass spectrometry, multiplex immunohistochemistry (mIHC) and molecular diagnostics, aiming to serve patients through every stage of disease - from early screening and diagnosis to treatment monitoring and minimal residual disease management. Its strategy centers on localized innovation and expansion in emerging markets including China, Singapore, Brazil, Indonesia and the Philippines. The company closed a US$100 million Series B round in January 2022 led by Sequoia China and Morningside Ventures.
Eric Klasson
Eric Klasson is the founder and CEO of Resilienci.ai, an Austin-based company that uses AI, machine learning and behavioral data to map hyperlocal infectious-disease risk and supply-chain disruption. A longtime entrepreneur and finance executive with a 40-year career spanning Price Waterhouse, PepsiCo and several technology startups, he previously co-founded the social-analytics firm Snaptrends and founded Pandemic Insights. He is also a longtime food-security advocate who has chaired and served on food-bank boards.
Baseimmune
Baseimmune is a London-based biotech that uses a proprietary deep-learning platform to design synthetic antigens - the active ingredients in vaccines and immunotherapies. Founded in 2019 by three researchers who met at Oxford's Jenner Institute, the company originally built AI-designed 'future-proof' vaccine candidates against fast-mutating pathogens such as coronavirus, malaria and African swine fever. In 2026 it extended its computational antigen-design platform beyond infectious disease into chronic conditions, with a lead program targeting idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Baseimmune closed an $11.3M (about GBP 9M) Series A in February 2024 led by MSD Global Health Innovation Fund and IQ Capital.
Resilienci.ai
Resilienci.ai is an Austin-based digital health company using artificial intelligence, machine learning and hyperlocal data to help people and public health agencies understand and reduce infectious-disease risk. Founded by Eric Klasson and operating as a Pandemic Insights company, it builds a free consumer mobile app paired with a web-based platform for health agencies, aiming to deliver the world's first interoperable, multi-pathogen digital health solution for outbreaks and pandemics.
Karius
Karius is a Redwood City, California life-sciences company that turns a single blood draw into a broad infectious-disease diagnosis. Its flagship Karius Test uses microbial cell-free DNA (mcfDNA) sequencing, metagenomics and AI to detect more than 1,000 pathogens - bacteria, DNA viruses, fungi and parasites - often within a day of receiving a sample. Founded in 2014 out of Stephen Quake's lab at Stanford, the company aims to give clinicians a fast, non-invasive alternative to invasive biopsies and slow cultures, with a focus on the immunocompromised patients who need answers most urgently.
Paragon Genomics
Paragon Genomics is a Fremont, California biotechnology company that makes it faster and cheaper to read the parts of a genome that actually matter. Its patented CleanPlex amplicon sequencing technology turns tiny or degraded DNA and RNA samples into sequencing-ready libraries in a few hours, powering targeted next-generation sequencing for cancer research, infectious-disease surveillance, inherited-disease testing and agricultural genomics. Founded in 2015 and backed by an $8M Series A, the company sells both ready-to-use and custom NGS panels to more than 300 labs worldwide.
Niamh O'Hara
Niamh O'Hara is the co-founder and CEO of Biotia, a New York healthtech company that pairs next-generation DNA sequencing with AI to identify pathogens causing hard-to-diagnose infections. An evolutionary biologist by training, she spun the company out of Cornell Tech with Weill Cornell geneticist Christopher Mason, runs a CLIA-certified metagenomics lab in Long Island City, and is building what she calls a global microbial sequence database to catch outbreaks before they spread.
Paratek Pharmaceuticals
Paratek Pharmaceuticals is a Boston-based commercial-stage biopharmaceutical company built on tetracycline chemistry to fight drug-resistant bacterial infections. Its flagship antibiotic NUZYRA (omadacycline) is a once-daily oral and IV broad-spectrum drug approved by the FDA in 2018 for community-acquired bacterial pneumonia and acute skin infections, and it is also being developed under a major BARDA contract as a national-stockpile countermeasure against pulmonary anthrax. Paratek also originated SEYSARA (sarecycline) for acne. Now privately held by Gurnet Point Capital and Novo Holdings after a 2023 acquisition, the company positions itself as a defender of public health against the slow-moving pandemic of antimicrobial resistance.
Dino Dina
Dr. Dino Dina is a Genoa-born physician-scientist who spent 15 years building Dynavax Technologies as its President and CEO, shepherding the company through the long road toward HEPLISAV-B, a two-dose hepatitis B vaccine whose CpG 1018 adjuvant technology later became a cornerstone of global COVID-19 vaccine programs. Before Dynavax, he built the Vaccine Group at Chiron Corporation and led Chiron Vaccines to the first-ever approval of an adjuvanted influenza vaccine in Italy. Since retiring in 2013, he has poured equal scientific rigor into his Cimarossa estate on Howell Mountain, Napa Valley - 60 mountain acres of vines and 1,200 olive trees named for the Italian phrase meaning 'red hilltop.'
Michael Bigham
Michael F. Bigham is a veteran biopharmaceutical executive and investor who spent nearly a decade as Chairman and CEO of Paratek Pharmaceuticals, guiding the company through the FDA approval and commercial launch of NUZYRA (omadacycline) - a novel tetracycline-class antibiotic tackling drug-resistant bacterial infections. A Stanford MBA and CPA with roots in Gilead Sciences' early days, he has built, funded, and led companies across the full arc of drug development. He now operates as founder and managing director of Firebrand River Capital.
Ryan Spencer
Ryan Spencer is the CEO of Dynavax Technologies, the Emeryville biotech behind HEPLISAV-B and the CpG 1018 adjuvant. He joined as an interim controller in 2005, climbed for fourteen years through finance, IR, and commercial roles, and took the top job in December 2019. Under him, Dynavax supplied adjuvant for nearly a billion COVID-19 vaccine doses and, in December 2025, agreed to be acquired by Sanofi for roughly $2.2 billion.
Alec Ford
Alec Ford is the chief executive of Karius, a Redwood City genomics-diagnostics company that reads microbial cell-free DNA from a single tube of blood to identify more than a thousand pathogens. He took the job in October 2020 and led the company through a $100M Series C in May 2024.
Katherine Wu
Katherine J. Wu, Ph.D. is a staff science writer at The Atlantic and one of the most respected science journalists working today. A former Harvard bacteriologist turned acclaimed writer, she translates complex biology - from pandemic viruses to the sex lives of deep-sea creatures - into stories that are simultaneously rigorous and riveting. Winner of the 2024 Kovler Prize and the 2022 Schmidt Award for Science Communication, she has reported for The New York Times, National Geographic, and Smithsonian, and holds a PhD in Microbiology and Immunobiology from Harvard. She writes the newsletter The Pivot, covering science and health.