About me

HEARTio

I cofounded HEARTio in 2018 with the goal of identifying patients with coronary artery disease more quickly, more accurately, and at a fraction of the cost of the current standard of care. HEARTio is a digital diagnostic company that uses deep learning to "upgrade" one of the most common and least expensive tests in medicine, the 12-lead electrocardiogram, so that it can flag anatomical coronary disease that a human reader cannot see.

Since then we have earned FDA Breakthrough Device Designation, published a 1,600-patient validation study in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology, been issued two U.S. patents, raised a seed round, and won first place at business plan competitions at Baylor, Tulane, and LiftOff PGH. As Chief Scientific Officer I lead the science: study design, model development and validation, regulatory strategy, and our publications. The full story is on the news and publications page.

Research

I earned my Ph.D. in Bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh in the MeLoDy Lab, advised by Dr. Natasa Miskov-Zivanov. My dissertation, In Silico Modeling of Macrophage Activation and Communication: Manual and Semi-Automated Assembly of Hybrid Models, had two threads: accurately simulating how macrophages respond to specific stimuli, and automating the assembly and extension of biological models from published literature.

The macrophage signaling network from that work is explorable on this site. A paper I presented and co-authored on translating machine-read literature into executable cell signaling models won the MOD 2017 Best Paper Award. My publications from both the lab and HEARTio are on Google Scholar.

Recognition & press

• 2024Forbes 30 Under 30, Healthcare, with my HEARTio cofounders
• Apr 2022Student Innovators of the Year, University of Pittsburgh Celebration of Innovation
• Mar 2022Pittsburgh Business Times 30 Under 30: "Meet Adam Butchy and Utkars Jain, HEARTio"
• Aug 2021Oracle for Startups: "How do you mend a broken heart? HEARTio founders use AI for cardiac diagnosis"
• Dec 2020Pittsburgh Business Times: "Pittsburgh health care startup wins Ideathon pitch competition"
• Nov 2020HEARTio achieves FDA Breakthrough Device Designation (video)
• 2018NSF I-Corps Site Team, Carnegie Mellon Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship
• Aug 2017Local chair, International Workshop on Bio-Design Automation (IWBDA) 2017
• Sep 2017MOD 2017 Best Paper Award for "Recipes for Translating Big Data Machine Reading to Executable Cellular Signaling Models"
• 2016Nominated for the AIChE Zeisberg Design Award for "Design and Optimization of a Cumene Production Process"

Elsewhere

I am on LinkedIn, GitHub, Google Scholar, X, and Instagram.