ADLM Annual Scientific Meeting & Clinical Lab Expo 2025

David M. Nathan, MD, is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He founded the Diabetes Center and directs the Clinical Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. An internationally acclaimed diabetes expert, he performed early, seminal studies to establish the HbA1c assay and conducted the first clinical studies with GLP-1 therapy in diabetes. Dr. Nathan is best known for his leadership of some of the most important studies in the treatment and prevention of diabetes including the Diabetes Control and Complications Trial and the Epidemiology of Diabetes Interventions and Complications Study in type 1 diabetes, and the Diabetes Prevention Program and the GRADE study in type 2 diabetes. David was awarded the Outstanding Clinician Award in 2002 and the inaugural Outstanding Achievement in Clinical Diabetes Research Award in 2015, both from the American Diabetes Association, and the 2010 Distinguished Scientist Award from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

Kathleen A. McMonigal, MD, FCAP, is the Director of Clinical Laboratories for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Dr. McMonigal oversees astronaut and occupational medicine laboratory testing at NASA. She is past chair of NASA’s Institutional Review Board. Dr. McMonigal is the NASA physician lead for development of medical standards for the Artemis program that is returning humans to the Moon and is also the NASA lead for the medical standards working group for the International Space Station. Her clinical laboratory team supports operational and research activities in the NASA space flight program.

Dr. Elizabeth Head received a Masters in Psychology and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Toronto, Canada. She received postdoctoral training at the Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders (UCI MIND) at the University of California – Irvine. She is a Dean’s Professor and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine. Dr. Head has dedicated over 25 years to the study of aging and Alzheimer disease with a focus on people with Down syndrome. The overarching goal of her laboratory is to use multidisciplinary approaches to identify targets for interventions for people with Down syndrome (DS) to slow or prevent the development of Alzheimer’s disease (AD).

Dr. Leeya F. Pinder is a distinguished gynecologic oncologist and Associate Professor at the University of Cincinnati. She also serves as the Associate Director for Cancer Control and Population Sciences at the University of Cincinnati Cancer Center. Dr. Pinder is deeply committed to improving women's health worldwide by creating and implementing high-impact programs for the prevention and treatment of breast and cervical cancers. She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles on topics such as HPV vaccination, thermal ablation, and addressing health disparities in gynecologic cancer care. Through her extensive research and mentorship, she has built in-country expertise and capacity by leading collaborative projects and training healthcare providers. Her work is dedicated to advancing equitable cancer care, both domestically and globally.

Anvil Diagnostics spun out of Rice University in 2022 to dramatically expand the multiplexing of commercial dPCRs for direct-from-blood pathogen diagnostics in hospital settings. Anvil will first launch its MycoScan™ assay in 2026 - a reagents and software package - that enables pan-fungal differentiation from cell-free DNA in plasma. With dPCR well adopted in settings managing patients at disproportionate risk of fungal infections (cancer & transplant centers, academic hospitals), Anvil brings a solution that can be readily accessed as an RUO assay as it continues development towards FDA clearance. As a pre-seed startup, Anvil has raised $2M in funding, initiated on-site pilots with 3 different hospitals testing its beta assay, and rallied significant support from major dPCR platform providers. Invasive fungal infections have 50-80% mortality rates, yet standard-of-care diagnostics either rely on invasive sampling and culture with about 50% yield and long turnaround times, or <10% yield from blood. There are no FDA-cleared blood tests on the market that resolve pathogen species, forcing clinicians to use multiple send-out tests with incomplete coverage. Clinicians rely on positive diagnoses before prescribing antifungals due to their severe toxicity and dangerous interactions with many drugs. MycoScan will enable reliable, noninvasive, and fast fungal testing with hardware that many hospitals have, combining the simplicity and accessibility of PCR with the breadth of DNA sequencing. Anvil has also demonstrated cross-application to bacterial testing and envisions a suite of simple liquid biopsies that help hospitals manage infections at all phases in critical care. Anvil's first product, MycoScan, is a minimally invasive pan-fungal blood test capable of identifying 41+ fungal species from plasma with a turnaround time of <4 hours. It addresses a critical unmet need in laboratory medicine: the diagnosis of invasive fungal infections (IFIs) in hospitalized immunocompromised patients, where current diagnostics detect fewer than 10% of early cases from blood alone. MycoScan will initially be released as a research use-only product, which can be rapidly validated by hospital mycology laboratories to best serve patients in need. Anvil has no subsidiaries and is currently pre-revenue.

Dr. Arun Wiita is a physician-scientist and Professor in the Dept. of Laboratory Medicine and Dept. of Bioengineering & Therapeutic Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Wiita’s research laboratory focuses on mass spectrometry-based proteomics, target discovery, protein engineering, and cellular engineering toward the development of novel immunotherapies for hematologic malignancies, while his clinical duties center on molecular genomic pathology. Dr. Wiita also directs the UCSF Stephen and Nancy Grand Multiple Myeloma Translational Initiative (MMTI) Laboratory. Dr. Wiita is a prior recipient of the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, a Clinical Scientist Development Award from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator Award, among others. He is also an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation. He completed his residency in Clinical Pathology at UCSF, his MD and PhD at Columbia, with graduate training in single molecule biophysics, and undergraduate studies in Chemistry at Princeton.

Augurex Life Sciences Corp. is a commercial-stage diagnostics company dedicated to translating disease-specific biology into clinically relevant laboratory tests for autoimmune and inflammatory conditions. Our core expertise centers on targeting 14-3-3eta, a joint-derived protein integral to inflammatory disease pathways, to address unmet needs in earlier diagnosis, prognosis, and disease monitoring. Augurex pioneered 14-3-3eta–based diagnostics in inflammatory arthritis. The 14-3-3eta blood test is approved as JOINTstat® in Canada and Great Britain and is used to support clinical decision-making in rheumatoid arthritis. In the U.S., 14-3-3eta testing is available via LDT pathways using analyte-specific reagents. Our diagnostic portfolio also includes SPINEstat® (Anti-14-3-3eta Multiplex Autoantibody Immunoassay), a first-in-class laboratory diagnostic for axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA), approved in Canada and the UK, and recently recognized by the U.S. FDA with Breakthrough Device designation. SPINEstat® measures multiple autoantibodies to 14-3-3eta. When combined with clinical findings, signs and symptoms consistent with axSpA, it aids in diagnosis, addressing the serious and prolonged multi-year diagnostic delay that arises when inflammatory back pain is misclassified as mechanical. FDA Breakthrough designation underscores SPINEstat’s potential to improve early, accurate differentiation of inflammatory versus mechanical back pain. Designed for laboratory medicine, Augurex technologies integrate seamlessly into existing clinical laboratory workflows and are in use or advanced validation across major labs in North America, with international expansion underway. We collaborate with clinicians, academic centers, industry partners, and patient advocacy organizations to ensure real-world utility and clinical impact by advancing biology-driven diagnostics that help get the right patients to specialty care sooner.

Kompass Diagnostics aims to expand healthcare beyond walls to shape new workflows that reduce healthcare costs, alleviate capacity shortages, and improve access to care. Kompass Diagnostics was founded by veterans in diagnostic commercialization, experts in semiconductor research, and entrepreneurs from Stanford University, the University of Chicago, and UCLA, with a vision to build a novel transduction platform that pioneers the next generation of point-of-care diagnostics. Its technology is the first multimodal diagnostic platform capable of delivering clinical-grade biochemistry, immunoassay, and molecular diagnostics in a single palm-sized device. Its proprietary electrical transduction assay (ETA) platform exhibits analytical sensitivity comparable to state-of-the-art laboratory technologies, enabling a broad menu of tests across diverse point-of-care settings based on finger-prick whole blood analysis within 10 minutes. The company’s first test is a rapid, multi-hormone test that guides time-sensitive decisions in fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization and egg freezing, reducing turnaround from hours to ten minutes. By increasing clinic capacity to serve more patients and reducing the operational costs of clinics, Kompass allows clinics to scale with a rapidly increasing demand for fertility treatments.