molecular-diagnostics
(16)
Paul Billings
Paul Billings has spent four decades asking the same hard question from different seats: how do you turn genetic information into something useful without letting it become something dangerous?
Albert Luderer
He spent thirty years turning lab science into products doctors actually use. Now he is betting that a synthetic peptide can beat the antibody at its own game.
Sanjeev Saxena
Sanjeev Saxena is a serial medical-device entrepreneur and engineer who has spent more than 30 years trying to move cancer screening out of expensive central labs and into villages, clinics and pop-up sites. He is founder, CEO and CTO of Harae Dx Corp., a Pleasanton, California startup building a low-cost, portable, automated cancer detection system based on lab-on-a-disc microfluidics. Earlier he founded POC Medical Systems, whose MammoAlert and Pandora CDx platforms brought portable breast-cancer screening to emerging markets, and he co-founded Scanis, Actis Biologics and Telesto Diagnostics. He has raised more than $70 million across his ventures and sits on the board of the Texas Tech Research Park.
Sasan Amini
Sasan Amini is the co-founder and CEO of Clear Labs, a San Carlos genomics company that turns next-generation DNA sequencing into a push-button diagnostic for food safety and infectious disease. An Iranian immigrant who left Tehran at 22, he earned a PhD in genomics at Princeton, worked in advanced research at Illumina, and in 2014 set out to make sequencing simple enough for any lab to run. When COVID-19 hit, Clear Labs pivoted its automated platform into SARS-CoV-2 surveillance and reached more than half of U.S. public health labs.
Shidong Jia
Shidong Jia, MD, PhD, is the founder and global CEO of Predicine, a Silicon Valley precision-oncology company building multi-omic liquid biopsy tests that read cancer from blood and urine. Trained as a physician-scientist at Harbin Medical University, Peking Union Medical College, Dana-Farber and Harvard, he ran oncology biomarker strategy at Genentech before leaving to start Predicine in 2015. His pitch is simple: precision diagnostics to enable precision medicine, built 'From Pharma, For Pharma.'
Aihua Fu
Aihua Fu is a nanobiotechnologist and the co-founder, President and CEO of NVIGEN Inc., a San Jose nanobiotechnology company building molecularly engineered magnetic and fluorescent nanoparticles for cancer detection and personalized medicine. Trained as a chemist under Nobel-track nanoscience pioneer A. Paul Alivisatos at UC Berkeley and as a postdoc at Stanford, she turned quantum-dot and magnetic-bead research into commercial tools for liquid biopsy, cfDNA extraction, single-cell sequencing and circulating tumor cell capture. Her flagship NVIGEN X and NERNST-Seq platforms aim to read DNA, RNA, protein and cell signals together to predict cancer recurrence early and guide therapy.
Dave Mullarkey
Dave Mullarkey is the CEO of ClearNote Health, a San Diego company that reads the chemical edits on your DNA to catch deadly cancers before symptoms show. A life-sciences operator who has shepherded three diagnostics and sequencing companies through scale-ups and acquisitions - Ariosa to Roche, Omniome to PacBio - he now leads the team behind the Avantect epigenomic blood tests for pancreatic and multi-cancer detection.
Gajus Worthington
Gajus Worthington is a life sciences entrepreneur, engineer, and inventor who turned an idea for circuits that move fluid instead of electrons into Fluidigm, a microfluidics company he co-founded in 1999 and led as CEO through its IPO and years as a public company. Today he is Chairman and CEO of Superfluid Dx, a South San Francisco company building a blood test that reads cell-free messenger RNA from the brain to diagnose Alzheimer's disease earlier and more precisely. Between those chapters he served as COO of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, co-founded Kaizen Therapeutics and the ML/AI healthcare company StatOS, and became a Managing Partner at WRQ Sciences.
Paul Sargeant
Paul Sargeant is the President and CEO of Circular Genomics, a San Diego biotech building blood tests around circular RNA - the loop-shaped, unusually stable molecules most of the field once ignored. A Cambridge-trained physiologist with 25 years across Fortune 100 firms and venture-backed startups in the US, Europe and Asia, he took the helm in 2023, shepherded the launch of the MindLight test predicting which depression patients will respond to SSRIs, moved headquarters into Lilly Gateway Labs, and closed a $15M Series A in December 2025 to push the same platform toward early Alzheimer's detection.
Tim Sweeney
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.
Vik Vaz
Vik Vaz is a physician-turned-executive who became CEO and President of San Diego multi-omics biotech Pleno Inc. in December 2024, arriving the same day the company closed a $25M Series B. Trained as a surgeon and interventional oncologist, he later ran strategy and companion diagnostics at Illumina and was a partner at both McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group. At Pleno he is commercializing the RAPTOR platform, which uses proprietary Hypercoding technology to detect DNA, RNA and protein targets in a single sample at high speed and low cost.
Yuanyuan Xu
Yuanyuan Xu is a structural biologist turned biotech founder who left the protein-crystallography bench at Tsinghua and Yale to build Cure Genetics (克睿基因), a Suzhou clinical-stage company chasing cell and gene therapies for solid tumors and genetic disease. She founded it in 2016, raised a $60M Series B in 2021, and bets on two homegrown platforms: an invariant-natural-killer-T cell therapy (AIMS CAR-NKT) and a directed-evolution engine for new AAV capsids (VELP).
Tom Schoenherr
Tom Schoenherr is CEO of Diagnostics at Tempus AI, the publicly traded precision-medicine company. He previously ran Ambry Genetics as CEO from 2021 to 2025, steering it through a definitive agreement to be acquired by Tempus. He has spent more than 25 years inside molecular diagnostics, with prior leadership stints at Counsyl, Quest Diagnostics, Siemens Healthcare, Abbott Diagnostics, and Omada Health.
John Hanna
John W. Hanna is President and CEO of CareDx, Inc., the leading transplant patient diagnostics company based in Brisbane, California. Appointed in April 2024, he brings over two decades of executive leadership in molecular diagnostics and life sciences, including a decade at Veracyte and a stint as CEO of Apton Biosystems. At CareDx, he is executing a bold three-year plan targeting $500 million in revenue and 20% adjusted EBITDA by 2027, transforming the company from a single-test diagnostics business into a full clinical ecosystem for transplant centers worldwide.
Kim Kelderman
Kim Kelderman is the President and CEO of Bio-Techne Corporation, a global life science tools and diagnostics company headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. With over 30 years of healthcare and life sciences experience, Kelderman rose through the ranks at Bio-Techne after joining in 2018 to lead the Diagnostics and Genomics segment, where he doubled the spatial biology business and commercialized the ExoDx Prostate test. A native of the Netherlands educated at Hogeschool Heerlen and Columbia Business School, he previously held executive roles at Thermo Fisher Scientific and Becton Dickinson. He became CEO on February 1, 2024, succeeding Chuck Kummeth.
Maneesh Jain
Maneesh Jain is the CEO and Co-founder of Mirvie, a South San Francisco-based biotech company pioneering RNA-based blood tests to predict pregnancy complications like preeclampsia and preterm birth months before symptoms occur. A serial entrepreneur with 20+ years in life sciences and more than $1.5B in combined exits across five prior startups - including Ion Torrent (acquired by Life Technologies) and Cirina (acquired by GRAIL) - Jain trained at the Stanford Genome Technology Center and holds a BS from Caltech and a Master's in Applied Physics from Stanford. Mirvie has raised over $90 million from investors including Khosla Ventures, GV, General Catalyst, and the Gates Foundation, and received FDA Breakthrough Device Designation for its preeclampsia risk test in 2022.