Sepsis is one of medicine’s most dangerous guessing games. Patients arrive with vague symptoms. Clinicians rely on instinct. And too often, the ones who look “okay” are the ones who crash. 

In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Dr. Tim Sweeney, physician-scientist and founder of Inflammatix, to trace the unlikely path from a tense moment at a medical conference to a breakthrough FDA-cleared diagnostic now shaping real clinical decisions. Tim shares why leaving residency was the hardest choice he’s ever made, how years of rejected grants pushed him toward entrepreneurship, and what it took to raise more than $150M to build a diagnostic tool medicine didn’t yet have. 

We go inside Trivarity, a blood test that reads the immune system itself to help doctors decide whether a patient has a bacterial infection, a viral infection, or something else entirely and how sick they’re about to become. Along the way, we talk about the limits of clinical intuition, why sepsis isn’t  one disease, and how better decisions, made earlier, can change outcomes. 

This is a conversation about conviction, risk, and what becomes possible when we stop guessing and start listening to the biology.

Subscribe to First in Human: 
- Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd 


Learn more about Inflammatix: https://inflammatix.com/
Tim on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-sweeney-a6589594/