SUNNYVALE, CA / ACCESS Newswire / October 8, 2026 / Inflammatix, Inc., a precision diagnostics company focused on measurement of the host immune response, today announced its selection as the commercialization collaborator and bedside platform developer for a Stanford Medicine-led team awarded $41 million by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). The award is part of ARPA-H's Critical Illness Immunological Reprogramming and Control Point Learning Engine (CIRCLE) program, which aims to reimagine how critically ill patients are cared for in intensive care units.
Under the award, Inflammatix will develop and commercialize the bedside immune-state readout that anchors the program: an investigational, rapid, whole-blood test that quantifies each patient's Hi-DEF immune state at the point of care and can be repeated as often as clinical management demands. Paired with a mechanistic digital twin built by the Stanford Medicine team, led by Purvesh Khatri, PhD, Professor of Medicine, the readout is designed to identify each patient's immune subtype and guide selection of the most appropriate immunomodulatory therapy in real time.
The problem CIRCLE was created to solve
Roughly 4.6 million Americans are admitted to intensive care units each year, and as many as 30 percent die in the hospital. Sepsis alone accounts for at least 350,000 U.S. deaths annually - more than breast cancer, prostate cancer, and opioid overdoses combined. Survivors frequently leave the hospital with post-ICU syndrome, a long-term condition that can include cognitive impairment, physical debility, and lasting emotional trauma.
Despite decades of clinical trials, there is no FDA-approved therapy that targets the dysregulated host immune response driving most of this mortality. Promising drugs help some patients and hurt others, and the averages come out flat.
A precision-medicine playbook, borrowed from oncology
In the 1970s, breast cancer was largely treated as one disease. The first molecular subtyping came with estrogen and progesterone receptor status; in the 1990s, HER2 added a second axis; in the 2000s, Oncotype DX and other multi-gene assays brought genomic precision to treatment decisions. Today, breast cancer is not treated as one disease but as a dozen, each with tailored therapies - and survival has improved accordingly. Just as importantly, that precision gave drug developers the tools to design therapies for the patients most likely to benefit, fueling an explosion of targeted drugs that would not have been possible in a world of syndrome-based enrollment.
Critical illness has yet to make that shift. Patients in the ICU are still classified by presenting syndrome (what put them there) rather than by the underlying immune biology that predicts their trajectory and their response to therapy. CIRCLE is designed to change that by combining continuous bedside measurement of the immune state, mechanistic digital twins that model how each patient will respond, and prospective testing of immunomodulatory interventions matched to biology rather than to syndrome.
"The lesson of the last fifty years of oncology is simple: once you can measure molecular subtypes reliably at the bedside, you unlock a generation of therapies designed for the patients they will actually help," said Tim Sweeney, M.D., Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer of Inflammatix. "Patients in the ICU deserve that same future, and we intend to help create it. CIRCLE is one of the boldest bets in federal science on getting there, and we are proud to be building the bedside platform that makes it possible."
Where CIRCLE fits in Inflammatix's broader strategy
Inflammatix is a precision-medicine platform company, built on a single principle: rapid, quantitative measurement of the host immune response can transform clinical decisions. That principle already extends from emergency department triage of acute infection with the TriVerity test, to pharmaceutical partnerships that use the company's diagnostics to select patients for host-directed therapy trials. CIRCLE brings the bedside technology into the ICU, as part of a strategy that reaches well beyond any single test or disease.
About the CIRCLE consortium
The Stanford Medicine-led CIRCLE team's work will be conducted alongside ARPA-H Acceleration Platform performers Verily Health, Sage Bionetworks, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
CIRCLE is a five-year ARPA-H program of up to $144.9 million, and is directed by ARPA-H Program Manager Yoram Vodovotz, Ph.D. Additional Technical Area teams have been selected at the University of Vermont and Novelna, Inc.
About Inflammatix
Inflammatix, Inc., based in Sunnyvale, California, is redefining molecular diagnostics by leveraging host-response biology, immunology, machine learning, and advanced data science to generate accurate, actionable results. Founded on research from Stanford Medicine, Inflammatix is developing rapid diagnostics that give clinicians an earlier, clearer picture of the immune response, supporting more confident decisions across acute infection, sepsis, and broader immune-driven disease.
For more information, visit www.inflammatix.com and follow @Inflammatix_Inc on LinkedIn and X.
Media Contact
Ashley Scholz
Inflammatix, Inc.
ascholz@inflammatix.com
(520) 730-4226
SOURCE: Inflammatix, Inc.
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