Kalen Hall
Co-founder and CEO | Informuta
During her PhD at Tulane University, Kalen Hall was researching one of modern medicine’s most urgent problems — how doctors couldn’t predict which infections would suddenly become resistant to antibiotics. The gap was especially dangerous for vulnerable patients like those who are immunocompromised or undergoing cancer treatment.
The research became deeply personal when fellow PhD student Leo Williams spent three weeks in the ICU after a severe, unexpected infection following routine surgery. One month after Williams recovered, he joined Hall in founding Informuta in January 2023.
Since launching, Informuta has grown into a multi-site company with operations at Johnson & Johnson Innovation’s JLABS in San Diego and the New Orleans BioInnovation Center. While the focus has long been on what resistance bacteria currently have, Informuta looks for predictive biomarkers that reveal whether an infection is on the brink of evolving resistance.
“Think of it like a weather forecast, but for infections,” Hall says. “We have models that read specific patterns in the genome and then warn clinicians before resistance emerges.”
So far, Hall and Williams have secured more than $2.75 million in funding, including an STTR award from the National Science Foundation, and expanded the company to nine team members. Clinical validation studies are underway with partners including Ochsner Health and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, with commercial availability anticipated in late 2026.
While at Tulane, Hall and Williams trained under Dr. Zac Pursell. Hall also worked with Dr. Lisa Morici studying high-priority bacteria and how they mutate to become multidrug-resistant, while Williams focused on cancer genomics and computational biology. Together, they were the first to apply certain analyses originally used in cancer genomics to bacteria, developing a completely novel class of bacterial predictive biomarkers that enable, for the first time, forecasting future antibiotic resistance.
The transition from third-year PhD student to CEO challenged Hall in unexpected ways.
“I knew the science inside and out, but had never run a clinical study, raised capital, designed FDA-level validation or managed a team,” she said. “Learning how to take deep academic research and turn it into a product that must be reliable, actionable and ready for real patients pushed me far outside my comfort zone. I’ve unexpectedly grown to love the storytelling, recruiting, fundraising and day-to-day problem-solving that come with leading a company.”
Hall said she and Williams have big plans for the future.
“Our goal is for Informuta to be the trusted brain behind how health systems understand, anticipate and respond to infectious threats.”
“Learning how to take deep academic research and turn it into a product that must be reliable, actionable and ready for real patients pushed me far outside my comfort zone.
