It currently takes 3-5 days to diagnose a bacterial infection, but every hour that a patient goes untreated increases their risk of death and complications. In the meantime, physicians have to fly blind and treat with powerful, broad-spectrum antibiotics, without knowing what the pathogen is or which drugs it is resistant to. At Day Zero Diagnostics (DZD), we are developing a sequencing-based rapid diagnostic that identifies both the species and the antibiotic resistance profile of a bacterial pathogen. We use high-throughput sequencing technologies and proprietary machine learning algorithms to report the diagnosis in hours rather than days. With DZD, physicians can treat patients with the most effective drug the same day they walk into the hospital, avoiding the complications, costs, and frustration associated with empiric therapy.

---

Q&A with Day Zero Diagnostics

Q: What is the story behind the central idea that inspired the creation of your organization/company?

A: We are a group of five cofounders who have known each other for years from either living together as roommates or having long-term friendships. Co-founder Doug Kwon, an infectious disease physician, dealt with the frustration of slow diagnostics for his patients suffering from infections, and seeded the idea. The team grew from there - due to the systems integration approach of our technology, we require a cross-disciplinary team that can span all of the different aspects of our diagnostic. Our founding team combines expertise in pathogen sequencing, infectious diseases, genomic analysis, machine learning and med tech commercialization. 

Q: What's the most inventive, innovative, or disruptive aspect of your initiative?

A: Almost all diagnostics in this space face a fundamental tradeoff between comprehensiveness and speed. Culture-based diagnostics can be comprehensive, covering a large swath of pathogens and resistance profiles, but they are inherently slow. Probe-based diagnostics can be very fast, but are severely limited in the breadth of pathogens they diagnose. DZD breaks free from this trade-off: we are culture-free (and therefore rapid), and use whole genome sequencing (and therefore comprehensive).

Q: What single word or phrase best describes the culture of your startup and why?

A: Tenacious. We are not afraid to solve the hard problems. Blood is probably the most difficult sample type to work with when it comes to molecular diagnostics for bacterial infections – sometimes people ask us why we didn’t start with a much easier substrate like urine. But because of the clinical significance of bacteremia, we decided not to shy away from it just because it was hard but rather to face down the challenge. It’s a philosophy that pervades our company ethos.