Joseph Sedlak

Joseph is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Mercy BioAnalytics. Joseph graduated summa cum laude from the University of Michigan with a degree in biomedical engineering and entered the M.D./Ph.D. program at Harvard Medical School to pursue his mission to improve the lives of those with cancer. Since arriving at Harvard, Joseph focused on reducing the mortality and morbidity of cancer by seeking clinical opportunities to help care for cancer patients and studying in several research labs across Harvard and MIT. These research experiences included modeling the evolution of cancer resistance to small molecules, studying immunotherapy resistance, and biomarker assay development. Informed by his experiences working with patients and the body of ongoing cancer research, Joseph critically assessed early detection as the largest unmet need in the field of oncology. The majority of early-stage, localized cancers can be cured by surgery alone. However, as cancer progresses and distant metastases have developed, surgery is rarely curative. After gaining insight into the challenges of early cancer detection and seeing the need for detecting cancers earlier go unmet, Joseph dedicated his efforts to improving cancer screening by co-founding Mercy BioAnalytics. Joseph is now on an authorized leave of absence from Harvard Medical School and plans to return to his fifth year in the M.D./Ph.D. program after seeing Mercy’s technology reach patients in prospective randomized clinical trials.