Episode 1: Revolutionizing How Clinicians Detect Infections in Immunocompromised Patients

Karius’ story is all about equipping doctors with the right information, for the right patient, at the right time. For most immunocompromised patients, it’s a matter (quite literally) of life or death. 

When Alec Ford’s daughter was just a toddler, she suffered with asthma and caught a viral infection that led to secondary bacterial infections and was hospitalized multiple times. Alec says he watched doctors try to help his daughter, but the tools they had to figure out exactly how to provide the best anti-infective care for her were all a failure. “They couldn't find the cause, they'd get the antibiotic wrong. I held her hand as they put her to sleep through multiple bronchoscopies, which as a new parent, you can imagine, just terrifies you to no end,” Alec says. “That’s why I’m at this company. It was this chance to be a part of changing something that was very personal to me.”  

Alec, who graduated from Stanford University and has more than 30 years of experience at top biopharma companies, including Pfizer, Sanofi-Aventis, Novartis, Nektar Therapeutics, and Myriad Genetics, is now CEO of ⁠Karius⁠. Karius developed the trademarked ⁠Karius Test⁠, a non-invasive liquid biopsy that can identify more than ⁠1,500 pathogens⁠—including the monkeypox virus—and helps clinicians identify the source of an infection in an immunocompromised patient, such as people who have cancer. Alec says that out of the 630,000 or so cancer deaths that occur every year in the U.S., over half of them are actually due to infection.  

Karius recently raised $165 million from a Series B funding round and was recently named to the Forbes AI 50, a list of the most promising artificial intelligence companies. 

You can follow Alec Ford and Karius on ⁠LinkedIn⁠.

LifeLines is produced by Biocom California, the leader and advocate for life science in California and beyond. To learn more about us, visit ⁠biocom.org⁠ or engage with us on ⁠Twitter⁠ and ⁠LinkedIn⁠. For a transcript of this episode, you can download it ⁠here.⁠ Interested in becoming a member or joining us on this podcast? Email ⁠podcast@biocom.org⁠. 

Host: Chris Conner 

Executive Producer: Marie Tutko 

Senior Producer: Vincenzo Tarantino 

Associate Producer: Lauren Panetta 

Program & Research Coordinator: Katy Burgess 

Transcripts By: Jessica Schneider  

Senior Director of Marketing: Heather Ramsay 

Graphic Design By: Raquel Papike