Paul Maritz, the cloud-computing expert who has run companies including Pivotal and VMware, is investing in and joining the board of Nanobiosym Diagnostics, the company said today.
Nanobiosym’s CEO Anita Goel (pictured) plans to work with Maritz to develop a way to make data from the company’s’s core diagnostic product available on a secure, customizable cloud platform. Terms of the investment were not disclosed.
Nanobiosym’s nanotech diagnostic, Gene-RADAR, is used to detect any type of disease in a few minutes using a drop of blood or saliva. Founded in 2004, the Cambridge, MA-based company has long had the goal of providing patients worldwide access to their own diagnostic information, as Goel told Xconomy readers in 2008. The physical device is low-cost and the size of an iPad, making it easier for patients to get real-time access to information about their health, Goel said in a statement.
The use of cloud systems in combination with data-streaming from sensors on the Nanobiosym devices could help governments, other agencies, and individuals better track the general health of populations, the company said in the statement.
“If Gene-RADAR were more broadly deployed in the developing world, the recent Ebola epidemic would have likely seen a very different outcome,” Maritz said in the statement. “The combination of game-changing technologies like Gene-RADAR, with big data and cloud computing solutions can immediately distribute medical diagnoses and alerts worldwide.”
Maritz, a longtime Microsoft exec in the ‘80s and ‘90s, joins other notable individuals on Nanobiosym’s board, including MIT professor Bob Langer, John Abele, founding chairman of Boston Scientific, and Ratan Tata of India-based Tata Group. Maritz’s Pivotal was unveiled in 2013 as a spinoff of various assets and people from EMC.
