Cure.
Overview
Claryx left stealth on August 4 with $3.5 million in pre-seed funding led by Outlander VC, and its platform is already live in multiple New York health systems.
Kurt and Dirk Hackenberger’s grandmother went into the hospital in 2004 for a routine procedure. She left three months later. Somewhere in that stay she contracted Clostridioides difficile, a gut infection, and then sepsis. Her family asked where it came from, and no one could tell them.
The brothers built Claryx to answer that question, and they’re betting hospitals will pay for the answer. Claryx came out of stealth on August 4 with $3.5 million in pre-seed funding led by Outlander VC. Its platform, CloneLink, is already running inside multiple New York health systems, reading the genome of each confirmed infection to trace it back to a likely source.
The business case is about how hospitals get paid. About one in 38 patients picks up at least one infection during treatment for something else, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Medicare reimburses a fixed amount per admission, so when a patient contracts an infection in the building, the hospital largely eats the cost of treating it. Each source Claryx identifies and cuts off spares the hospital the cost of another infection it would otherwise absorb.
“The management of infectious disease has been stuck in the past for a long time. Now we’re developing some tools that are able to better manage it,” said Dirk Hackenberger, PhD, who serves as Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer.
How Claryx Traces an Infection
A hospital can confirm an infection within hours but spend weeks figuring out where it came from. Two patients on the same ward with Klebsiella may have caught it from completely separate sources, and a culture identifies the organism but can’t distinguish one strain from another. So teams count cases on a unit and investigate when the number climbs past normal, which means an outbreak spread thin across several wards can stay invisible.
Claryx compares strains instead of counts. When two match, it checks patient records for overlap, like a shared room, unit, or piece of equipment. It also sequences the building itself, using air samples, surface swabs, water, and wastewater to build a genetic map the company calls a digital twin, then matches patient strains against it.
“What we offer is the opportunity to get proactive sequencing on every single infection that’s happening inside the hospital,” said Kurt Hackenberger, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer.
The Economics of Sequencing Everything
Sequencing works, but it’s expensive, so hospitals ration it for outbreaks already big enough to notice, then ship samples to an outside lab and wait weeks. Claryx built its pitch on driving that cost down. The chemistry Dirk Hackenberger developed during his PhD under Gerry Wright at McMaster University cuts the cost of the most expensive step by more than twentyfold, according to the company, which makes it cheap enough to sequence everything, continuously, and still sell it.
The company now sequences patient isolates weekly, air and wastewater daily, and surfaces and drains monthly. The isolates are bacteria the hospital lab grows to identify an infection and would otherwise throw away, so no patient swabs or protected health information change hands.
“Hospitals’ hair is on fire all the time, and adding to their workload just doesn’t really work,” Kurt Hackenberger said.
Beyond the Hospital
Genomic surveillance has been tested in hospitals before. A University of Pittsburgh team ran its own system at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital for two years and published the results in Clinical Infectious Diseases. It caught 172 outbreaks that standard surveillance missed, including nine linked to endoscopes, each caught at two patients. One earlier outbreak had taken 14 months to recognize, by which point it had caused five deaths.
But Pittsburgh had university researchers and a university lab behind that work. Claryx is betting that same capability can be implemented in hospitals that get these types of outbreaks but have no lab or research staff to catch them. Nursing homes and long-term care facilities come next, then ordinary indoor spaces.
Antibiotics and vaccines made infectious disease feel settled, and modern medicine was built on that assumption. Vaccine hesitancy, antimicrobial resistance, and engineered pathogens are unsettling it.
“It feels like infectious disease is becoming a bigger problem again, and we think we have technology to be able to tamp that down,” Dirk Hackenberger said.
