Above: photo by Len Rubenstein

No disease can be slowed or stopped until it is diagnosed. For diseases with available treatments, the facts are simple: The earlier they are detected, the higher the survival rates. Two companies at the Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab are working to improve diagnostic tools, expediting the time frame and accuracy of results. Using genomics and machine learning, Day Zero Diagnostics (DZD) and Aikili Biosystems aim to save lives.

“A common reaction to our venture is that it is ‘ambitious.’ Clearly our goals are not easy to pull off,” says Jong Lee (MBA 1999), CEO of DZD. “The thing about founding a company in life sciences is that what you are trying to do has never been done before.” Aikili founder Laura Kelley (MBA 2019) agrees. “There’s a certain amount of passive skepticism required in this space,” she observes. “You need to suspend disbelief—to imagine a new state of the world—while working toward milestones that put patient safety first.”

Laura Kelley (MBA 2019)
(photo by Len Rubenstein)

Laura Kelley (MBA 2019)
(photo by Len Rubenstein)

Lee and Kelley are both leading firms at the intersection of biology and computer science, each striving to develop and commercialize medical diagnostic tools that will, ultimately, improve health outcomes. Lee’s DZD was one of the inaugural startups in 2016 at the Life Lab, a state-of-the-art wet lab and coworking space in Allston for Harvard affiliates. Kelley’s Aikili was recently accepted as a new member of the lab.

In 2016 Lee and four Harvard cofounders launched DZD to apply genome sequencing and machine learning to the problem of growing antibiotic resistance. Their technology helps doctors diagnose life-threatening infections, like sepsis, more quickly and accurately so that patients can be treated with the right antibiotic on the first day they are admitted to the hospital—day zero—rather than being hit with multiple days of toxic broad-spectrum antibiotics. To enable their diagnostic tools, DZD has built one of the world’s largest databases of pathogen genomic sequences paired with their antibiotic susceptibility profiles.

The expertise DZD has developed along its three-year journey is already being deployed in clinical settings. “Our goal has always been to be commercially relevant, even during our R&D phase,” notes Lee. DZD recently launched a service—epiXact—to help medical facilities detect and control outbreaks of health care–associated infections. Lee notes that services like epiXact are not DZD’s primary objective, but they are critical to “developing customer instincts and building commercial muscle” while also accomplishing one of the company’s key goals: using genomic data and machine learning to improve health care.

Kelley, who recently received a Blavatnik Fellowship in Life Science Entrepreneurship at HBS, aims to bring fast and accurate diagnoses to cancer patients around the world. “The majority of new cancer cases are in emerging markets,” observes Kelley, who spent six years commercializing drugs and diagnostics in East and West Africa before earning her MBA. “There are frequently delays in diagnosis, where the turnaround time for a biopsy could be several weeks or months.” That lag time, she explains, can be a matter of life or death given that early detection of cancer is a key factor in survival rates.

Day Zero Diagnostics research team (photo by Susan Young)

Working with a team from Harvard Medical School, Kelley, who holds a master’s in public health, is commercializing a method to detect cancer markers on-site in clinical settings using deep learning. “We are excited about emerging markets, where we see high adoption rates of technologies designed for the point-of-care,” she says. “In the United States, we can use deep learning to generate rich information that enables personalized medicine.” While Kelley and her team are well on their way to developing a technology that rapidly identifies the molecular markers of cancer, there is a lot of work to be done to bring a product to market. Kelley points out that one of the key dilemmas Aikili faces is not unique to them. “A question that echoes across many fields right now is ‘What should humans do and what should algorithms do?’” she notes.

As she seeks to tackle tasks such as securing FDA approvals and raising venture funding, Kelley has already found her affiliation with the Life Lab and her access to other founders, including Lee and his team, to be transformative.

Lee, who has raised $12 million for DZD, attributes the very existence of the company to the Harvard Innovation Labs ecosystem and is happy to share his experience with other founders. “When we started the company, we asked ourselves whether the problem we were addressing was meaningful enough that we would be proud to spend a decade of our lives working on it,” says Lee. Three years in, he is certain that the DZD team’s ambitious agenda is a worthwhile pursuit.

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