Kevin Hrusovsky, CEO,  Quanterix

Kevin Hrusovsky would like to change the way you go to the doctor. In fact, he’d like to change the way you think about your relationship with the doctor altogether.

“We’re trying to transition sick care, where you get sick with symptoms and then you get treated, to health care, so you actually prevent the sickness from ever coming. Or if it does come, you find it early,” says Hrusovsky. “If you could find the disease before the symptoms ever presented, you could better treat them or you could prevent them.”

Hrusovsky says sick care, where patients seek out their doctor once something has gone wrong, dominates medicine because no one has had a better idea. After all, perfectly healthy patients can’t waste their time checking in with the doctor every few months “just in case.” However with access to better tools, patients could monitor their own health and spot any issues in advance. Those are the tools that Hrusovsky would like to build.

“Quanterix has the ability to see a grain of sand in 2,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools,” Hrusovsky says. “You’re really talking about rocket science in a technology.”

This rocket science involves looking for specific proteins in the blood called “biomarkers,” a clinical term for the chemical indicators your body develops that signal changes from an open wound to undetected cancer. By testing for these proteins, doctors and patients can see a problem before it even develops, catching diseases at their most treatable stage.

Take dementia, Hrusovsky says. “We can actually see proteins in the blood elevate 15 years before dementia sets in, and that’s a game-changing opportunity because we can treat Alzheimer’s years and years before symptoms set in.”

While he’s far from a world of off-the-shelf kits, that kind of accessibility is ultimately Hrusovsky’s goal. He would eventually like to develop simple, at-home tests for specific diseases that someone could run on a few drops of blood or saliva. In this world of health care, patients wouldn’t worry about spotting a disease in time or constantly visiting the doctor. They’d have the tools to know when something has gone wrong, ideally long before the first discomfort even sets in.

“We think that’s the key to changing medicine,” he says. “This is a chance to really reduce the pain and suffering of premature illness around the world.”