Karius, Inc.

Today, in hospitals and exam rooms around the world, when a doctor has a patient who is suffering from an infection of some sort, it is easy for them to know with confidence that the patient has an infection. This is simple.

However, in the very best hospitals around the world, what can be extremely difficult to understanding is the etiology of the infection. Roughly half the time, the doctors charged with treating this very sick patient don't know what they are fighting against. They are in the dark. They may not know for weeks or for months. In fact, they may never know what it was that was infecting their patient. So, what do they do?

First, they will likely draw blood and send it off to be cultured in hopes that something may turn up positive. Very often that result comes back inconclusive. They may try a second, or a third or a fourth culture. Each culture can take 2-5 days to return a result, and the result could very well remain inconclusive. To make matters even more difficult for these doctors, only a fraction of the pathogens that cause disease in humans can be cultured. They have a really difficult job identifying their enemy.

During this process, the patient may be put on several broad spectrum antibiotics, including Carbapenems, which can be problematic. But hopefully this keeps the patient alive while the doctor or team of doctors work furiously to try to deduce what they are up against. This process can take weeks or even months and may hopefully lead to the patient recovering.

Far too often, the outcome isn't a happy one.

Karius is changing the playing field for doctors. From a single sample of the patient's blood, Karius can put the enemy in plain sight. We detect over a thousand different pathogens from a single test, a test that identifies these pathogens via the unique DNA sequences we're able to detect in the patient's blood. And because blood circulates throughout the body, regardless of the location of the infection, we will detect these pathogens and report back to the treating clinician what they're fighting against. The guesswork is gone and that doctor can get to work on treatment for the patient.

This saves lives. When was the last time you worked on a system that did that?