4/23/2026
Reddy’s company, Prenosis — co-founded with Illinois Grainger Engineering Professor and current Dean Rashid Bashir — develops AI diagnostic tools for precision medicine in acute care by mapping patients’ unique biological profiles. Prenosis announced in January the completion of its $20 million Series A Financing Round and a $20 million contract with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).
A biology-based technology company founded by Illinois Grainger alums will use recent funding to support commercial delivery of AI-based precision medicine tools.
Bobby Reddy, Jr. knows a thing or two about maps.
Reddy’s company, Prenosis — co-founded with Illinois Grainger Engineering Professor and current Dean Rashid Bashir — develops AI diagnostic tools for precision medicine in acute care by mapping patients’ unique biological profiles. Prenosis announced in January the completion of its $20 million Series A Financing Round and a $20 million contract with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). This combined $40 million in funding will advance the development of Prenosis’ AI diagnostic and therapeutic products, improving patient outcomes for serious yet underfunded conditions like sepsis. But before Reddy (‘12, Ph.D., electrical and computer engineering) and his company were mapping biological profiles, he was mapping something else—hospital care for critical conditions.
When Reddy and Bashir first combined their entrepreneurial interests in 2012, the result was a point-of-care device that measured cell biomarkers from blood. After securing funding from a strategic investor, the duo moved their headquarters to Carle Foundation Hospital in Champaign. While their device technology was unique, they quickly realized it would not be profitable.
“It was a cool technology, but the market wasn’t there, so we chose to pivot,” Reddy said.
The shift inspired Reddy to embrace his natural curiosity, identifying gaps in clinical workflow that could impact the needs of clinicians and patients.
“I took full advantage of my time at Carle,” Reddy said. “I talked to a lot of doctors. I talked to a lot of patients. I talked to lab technicians. I talked to everyone within the hospital; I just explored everything.”
Reddy’s informal hospital-wide tour highlighted a surprising disparity: although sepsis is the costliest condition in U.S. hospitals, it is chronically underfunded and has no FDA-approved drugs for targeted treatment. This highlighted what he considered a fundamental problem: without understanding the detailed biology of patients in the acute care setting, providers are unable to treat based on the individual biology of each patient. For sepsis patients, this often results in off-label corticosteroid treatments—which for some patients can be more harmful than helpful.
“I learned a lot about sepsis and how impactful it is; how many patients die from it,” Reddy said. “Even when patients survive, their lives are forever altered. There’s so much focus on oncology, immune conditions and even rare diseases, but sepsis is a very common disease that doesn’t get a lot of attention. It’s completely lopsided in terms of awareness and focus. That struck me as a problem that not a lot of people were working on.”
Reddy wondered if hospital care could benefit from its own version of the Human Genome Project of the 1990s, which widely sequenced human DNA. This realization was a junction point for Reddy and Bashir, who transitioned their company from a focus on devices to a focus on data. With their passion problem identified, the Illinois Grainger duo was ready to map a solution.
“We started to run this mini human genome project, collecting samples from lots of patients,” Reddy said. “Over the past 10 years, we’ve built one of the world’s largest immune biobanks for sepsis and other conditions in the hospital. Using the knowledge derived from that data, we build AI diagnostic products that can predict disease well in advance of its occurrence.”
In 2024, Sepsis ImmunoScore® received the first and only FDA authorization for an AI diagnostic tool for sepsis; Prenosis then partnered with Roche to bring the product to market. The company’s success allowed them to expand, building out product development and technology teams and recruiting laboratory technicians and regulatory specialists to advance their clinical research capabilities. Reddy credits the company’s growth to its reimagined purpose.
“Finding a problem I was passionate about really helped the company grow and move towards a vision. In the beginning, we didn’t have a strong direction; we weren’t moving towards any particular goal. But replacing the desire to simply start a company with a desire to solve a huge problem really set the North Star for our company. Regardless of how tough things get, we always look to that North Star.”
Coupled with the company’s existing track record, this passion for eradicating sepsis helped Prenosis recruit investors like PACE Healthcare Capital, UC Investments, UCI Health Ventures, the Labcorp Venture Fund, GHIC, DCEO and Carle Health, whose combined $20 million in financing will continue to support the commercial delivery of Sepsis ImmunoScore. Prenosis also aims to expand its precision medicine platform, which will be validated through a randomized controlled trial of 800 patients — an initiative that will be funded largely by the company’s recent BARDA award. Reddy hopes the resulting data will empirically reflect the positive impact on patient outcomes and hospital finances.
“We live in a world where hospitals need to invest in technologies that can benefit their finances,” Reddy said. “We spend millions of dollars on the sickest patients in the acute care setting, but there are no effective treatments for serious conditions like sepsis. When a diagnostic like Sepsis ImmunoScore is linked to a therapeutic, it is much more impactful on the patient and on the hospital’s finances, and our hope is that it will open new markets for big pharma.”
Bashir attributes the company’s success to its ardor for solving real-world problems.
“Tremendous credits go to Bobby for pivoting the company towards data science and AI, and for building the largest sepsis biobank-linked dataset in the world,” Bashir said. “His passion for eradicating deaths due to sepsis is inspiring and infectious.”
Like travelers following a road map, Reddy and his team remain guided by their own North Star: improving patient outcomes in the acute care setting. The next phase of this initiative will expand beyond sepsis to pneumonia, acute heart failure and acute kidney injury. But Reddy’s ultimate goal is to map something even bigger: precision medicine for acute healthcare.
“I want to cause a shift in the industry, because that is what will drive change,” Reddy said. “Prenosis is just one company; we will create a few products that hopefully will be very impactful, but for there to be 10 or 20 products available, we need to get big pharma interested. I want to show them that it’s possible to be very profitable in running clinical trials and improving outcomes for patients in the hospital.”
Illinois Grainger Engineering Affiliations
Rashid Bashir, Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering and professor of bioengineering, is also the Dean of the Grainger College. He is a fellow of the IEEE, the Biomedical Engineering Society, a member of the National Academy of Medicine and Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the 2018 Pritzker Distinguished Lecture Award from BMES and was a key member of the founding team at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, the world's first engineering-based medical school. He also serves as the Vice Chancellor for Chicago Strategic Partnerships.