A Chat with Professor Michael Atar, Scientific Advisor And Lead Investor in Cytovale

Cytovale is a medical diagnostics company based in the San Francisco area. It’s made up of extraordinarily talented scientists, engineers, clinicians and dreamers, who are all focused on developing affordable early detection technologies to diagnose fast moving diseases like sepsis, the number one cause of death in hospitals.

Although sepsis might not be the “sexiest” cause in the litany of medical ailments to cure, it is in fact on par with heart disease and cancer as a leading cause of death, and is responsible for more than 270,000 fatalities each year in the United States alone.

While researchers and scientists are still hard at work to improve our odds of surviving heart disease and cancer, Cytovale’s work stands to revolutionize how doctors and medical professionals will diagnose and treat sepsis in the near future. It’s my hope that, soon, sepsis will have dropped from a leading cause of death to a disease that only rarely proves fatal, thanks to Cytovale’s discovery of a path to early diagnosis.
 
 

 

What do you think makes this company unique?

 
Cytovale stands apart from the rest thanks to their miraculous invention of IntelliSep, which stands to disrupt the medical industry and save countless lives that would otherwise be lost to sepsis. As a fast-moving disease that is traditionally very slow to be correctly diagnosed, sepsis has an alarmingly high fatality rate. In their journey to tackle the confounding riddle of modern medicine, our team created IntelliSep, a groundbreaking new diagnostic tool that helps clinicians recognize sepsis, providing test results in under ten minutes from a standard blood draw.

This has the potential to save an extraordinary number of patients, since every minute is crucial in identifying sepsis: the risk of death from it increases by up to eight percent for each hour the condition goes untreated. As such, the impact of IntelliSep as an affordable early detection could reverberate across countless lives and families the world over.
 

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

 
The years of hard, dedicated work testing and refining IntelliSep are finally paying off: as of January 2023, Cytovale’s IntelliSep test has received US Food and Drug Administration clearance to aid in the early detection of sepsis in the roughly 30 million adults with signs of infection who visit American emergency departments each year. We will finally be able to see our innovation reach the people it was invented for, and I couldn’t be more thrilled. This seal of approval makes the company a market leader, placing it at the forefront of biomedtech.