Serendipitous Discovery

Confer was founded to use rigorously vetted science and technology to help a friend in need, and that spirit continues to run through our veins.

Throughout his PhD at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Mounir Koussa studied the workings of the inner ear at the nano scale with a purely scientific mindset. But during a chance trip to a drugstore, one of his closest friends lamented about her frustrations with at-home pregnancy testing, which got Mounir thinking — if this technology can be used to measure a single molecule in the lab, what’s to stop us from using it at home?

Mounir successfully developed the science he used for his PhD into a diagnostic platform that he published in Nature Methods. After completing his dissertation he unleashed his curiosity for quantitative diagnostics, founding Confer to go back to the drawing board. Rather than trying to adapt existing hospital technologies for consumers, a team of world-class scientists at Confer built a fundamentally new diagnostic platform from scratch, designed from day one to bring clinical-grade sensitivity into the home.