Tesseract Health Appoints Head of Cardiovascular and Digital Health

Tesseract Health has welcomed a former Google executive to its management team.

The company recently appointed Michael McConnell, M.D., MSEE, as Tesseract’s head of Cardiovascular and Digital Health. This role completes Tesseract’s leadership team and coincides with a series of critical, strategic hires under the helm of CEO Vicky Demas, Ph.D.

“I am honored that Dr. McConnell has joined our team to launch an end-to-end solution that enables health screening outside of specialists’ offices,” stated Dr. Demas. “I am confident that our pipeline of non-invasive health products will change the way we address systemic disease moving forward.”
 
Demas hired McConnell to leverage Tesseract’s technology and expand its cardiovascular strategy. He will lead and champion the design, planning, development and clinical research for cardiovascular health products. McConnell trained at MIT, Stanford University, and Harvard University, and directed programs in cardiovascular imaging, prevention, and digital health at Stanford Medicine, and then Google, as the senior clinical lead at Google Health/Fitbit.
 
“I’m very excited to join Dr. Demas and the Tesseract Health leadership team to advance our mission to democratize point-of-care screening and monitoring of important health conditions,” said McConnell. “My academic and industry career has focused on leveraging technology for early disease detection and prevention, and demonstrated how the eye provides a direct window to see the impact of diabetes, high blood pressure, and risk of heart attack and stroke. I aim to bring my expertise in imaging, prevention, and digital health to develop innovative, new ocular health biomarkers and products to help people around the world live healthier lives.”
 
Tesseract aims to create a new standard in diagnostics that will bridge imaging technology and laboratory medicine, leveraging technology and AI to detect health conditions through the eyes. The venture-backed technology company is developing a portable, non-invasive platform to detect health conditions through the eyes, and is part of 4Catalyzer, a medical technology accelerator founded by Dr. Jonathan Rothberg that has launched Butterfly Network, Quantum-Si, Hyperfine and Liminal Sciences, Detect, AI Therapeutics, Tesseract, and Protein Evolution. All of the 4Catalyzer companies are transforming 21st century medicine and improving the planet by solving today’s most challenging problems across life science research tools, medical devices, therapeutics and the environment. 

The Tesseract platform is not cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and is not available for sale.