In elderly and immunocompromised individuals, something as seemingly simple as a urinary tract infection (UTI) can become serious very quickly.

Currently, diagnosing UTIs can take up to three days while a urine sample is sent to a centralized lab for processing. In order to relieve a patient’s discomfort, doctors often guess which antibiotic to prescribe, rather than wait for the lab results to come in, says Emily Melzer, CEO and cofounder of Latde Diagnostics. “In up to 40 percent of cases, that guess is incorrect,” she explains, adding that misdiagnoses like these contribute to the growing problem of antibiotic resistance. Melzer’s company, Latde Diagnostics, seeks to address this problem by developing rapid diagnostic tools. Existing rapid diagnostics require expensive machinery, which is out of reach for many smaller medical offices, Melzer says.

The idea for Latde Diagnostics originated when Melzer was a PhD student in microbiology at UMass Amherst, working in the lab of M. Sloan Siegrist, associate department head of research and associate professor of microbiology. Siegrist's father was in the hospital with sepsis, and she was shocked at how long it took doctors to determine the right antibiotic to treat him. Siegrist asked Melzer to start a company with her to develop a test that could efficiently guide antibiotic treatment decisions.

Siegrist and Melzer went through the National Science Foundation-sponsored I-Corps program at UMass Amherst, which supports students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty, and staff teams in transferring technology discoveries into products and services that meet the needs of customers. I-Corps participants conduct a minimum of 100 interviews to learn more about the market for their product. For Siegrist and Melzer, these interviews quickly revealed that while diagnosing sepsis was a worthy cause, there was a much bigger demand for rapidly diagnosing another health condition.

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"It became very clear that there was a huge need for an antibiotic susceptibility test for UTIs, specifically one that could be used at point of care," says Melzer. "The beauty of I-Corps was we learned that very early on, and so we didn't waste too much time or resources on the wrong product.

"At UMass, there's this really great supportive network trying to help people at the university translate their work in science to real-world solutions."

Learn more about Melzer's and Siegrist's path to founding Latde Diagnostics and about UMass Amherst's innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem. 

This story was originally published in July 2025.