About Alva10
Built to fix what the healthcare system ignores
Diagnostics account for less than 5% of reimbursable healthcare costs, yet guide more than 70% of clinical decisions. Alva10 was founded to close that gap: aligning incentives across payers, employers, and diagnostic developers so the right tools reach the right patients. This enables the move from Population Health -> Precision Medicine.
<5%
of reimbursable healthcare costs
70%+
of clinical decisions guided by diagnostics
35%
average FDA drug approval response rate
2016
Founded
— Cambridge, MA
Our Mission
To create an economic ecosystem that pulls diagnostic technology into healthcare — aligning incentives and optimizing for patient outcomes and lower total cost of care.
In the US, healthcare readily pays for drugs and procedures, but not for the diagnostics that can tell us what is right for the individual patient. Precision Medicine is the use of diagnostic tools combined with patient health information to make informed, patient-specific decisions — requires that diagnostics be available, used by physicians, and paid for by employers and payers. Alva10 makes that happen.
Knowledge Over Assumption
We believe that primary diagnosis and evidence-based risk assessment should precede every treatment decision — not follow it. Accurate knowledge of a patient's disease is the foundation of effective care.
Aligned Incentives
We build structures where every stakeholder — payer, employer, diagnostic developer, and investor — has a clear reason to support better diagnostics. When incentives align, innovation reaches patients.
Evidence From Day One
We define the clinical and economic evidence standards required for payer coverage before development begins — so diagnostic companies build exactly what the market needs, and nothing is wasted.
20+Therapy
Therapy areas in portfolio
35+ Years
of diagnostic industry leadership
Global
average FDA drug approval response rate
Founded 2016
— Cambridge, MA
Founder's Story
Challenging the healthcare paradigm
Alva10 was built on a simple, provocative question: how do we move the healthcare system from trial-and-error medicine to Precision Medicine? The answer, and the company, grew from two careers spent watching innovation fail to reach patients for entirely commercial, not scientific, reasons.
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"We needed to make it impossible for payers to not be interested in the value propositions we were bringing them. The savings needed to be big enough to turn their attention to diagnostics as the solution." — Lena Chaihorsky, Co-Founder
When Hannah and Lena met working for a global diagnostics developer, both had arrived at the same conclusion: the challenges facing diagnostic technology were not scientific — they were commercial. Early-stage diagnostic companies had no mechanism to work with payers pre-commercially to understand what clinical evidence would be required, what the diagnostic would need to demonstrate, or what it would be paid for. The model of the diagnostics industry had always been: build the test, complete validation, then seek reimbursement. This meant that the most critical questions — is our test valuable to the customer? Will it be covered, by whom, and at what rate? — were answered last, after capital had already been spent and development was complete. Alva10 was founded to move those questions to the beginning of the process. By engaging with employers, who experience both the high cost of healthcare and result of lost productivity when employee health isn’t optimally managed, and by working with payers to define coverage standards and contractually commit to them upfront, Alva10 created a mechanism that aligns every stakeholder — payer, diagnostic company, employer, and investor — around a shared path to patient impact.
Hannah Mamuszka spent over two decades in diagnostics — moving from the lab to the business side of healthcare at pharmaceutical and diagnostic companies alike. Early in her career, working on a now-blockbuster drug, she was shocked to discover that drugs pass regulatory approval without an accompanying diagnostic to identify which patients would actually respond — even when response rates were below 40%. She spent the following decade building diagnostics to impact patient care, watching as promising tools based on genomics, proteomics, and genetics consistently hit a wall: unless someone is financially incentivized to pay for a test, it won't exist — regardless of its clinical value. Meanwhile, Lena Chaihorsky was learning the same lesson through a different lens. Her work at a women's health company revealed that a diagnostic capable of generating enormous cost savings was initially offered a maximum reimbursement of just $11. She set out to build one of the first value-based reimbursement strategies for a diagnostic — successfully securing a value-based Medicare rate that made the test economically viable.
The result: Alva10's portfolio today spans more than 20 therapy areas including oncology, infectious disease, autoimmune disease, cardiovascular disease, NASH, rare disease, and more — with global market experience across the US, Europe, and beyond. Payers and employers now consider Alva10 a trusted partner and resource.
Hannah Mamuszka
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Biochemistry & Physiology
· 20+ years in diagnostics & pharma
Hannah founded Alva10 in 2016 after a career spanning the laboratory and business sides of healthcare in both pharma and diagnostics. Prior to Alva10, she was VP of Business Development at Exosome Diagnostics (acquired by BioTechne), where she led some of the earliest deals in the liquid biopsy space. Earlier in her career, she served as Global Director of Pharmaceutical Services for Oncotech and Exiqon (acquired by QIAGEN), building the Pharmaceutical Services and Companion Diagnostics business across the US, Europe, and internationally. She began her career as a scientist at the National Institutes of Health, holding positions in both the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. Hannah is a frequent writer and contributor on the challenges of implementing change in medicine and the value of diagnostics in healthcare. Read her work on Substack
• Bionano Genomics (BNGO)
• Centile Biosciences
• UNC Health Informatics Program
Liquid Biopsy
Companion Diagnostics
NIH
Pharma Services
Substack
Lena Chaihorsky
Co-Founder & SVP,
Payer Innovation
Biology & Mathematics,
Tufts University
Lena is co-founder and SVP of Payer Innovation at Alva10. Throughout her career she has specialized in designing product-market fit between diagnostic innovation and the insurance industry — building the clinical and economic cases that lead to coverage and access for precision medicine. Her experience spans national contracting, sales, and reimbursement strategy across startups and global organizations. Lena is a nationally recognized expert and speaker on precision medicine in the employer space, translating its clinical and financial implications for the benefits leaders who shape how employers invest in the health of their workforces. She currently leads the National Association of Brokers-initiated effort to develop a precision medicine certification for benefits brokers — creating a knowledge infrastructure that does not yet exist in the market. Lena believes precision medicine will fundamentally change how we experience and pay for healthcare, and works across the healthcare ecosystem through board service, nonprofit leadership, and industry education to enable that reality. Previously, her work on health economics and commercial strategy led to her appointment as co-chair of the World Economic Forum's workgroup on the economics of rare disease data federations in 2019. She serves on the board of a bladder cancer diagnostics company and chairs the Novel Payment and Business Models Committee at Lab 2.0, a nonprofit working to center diagnostics as the enabler of a modernized, data-driven healthcare system.
Payer Innovation
Employer Health Benefits
World Economic Forum
Precision Medicine
Lab 2.0
Value-Based Reimbursement
Founding Team
Our Portfolio
Diagnostics across the full spectrum of disease
Alva10's portfolio spans more than 20 therapy areas — each defined by the clinical and economic impact that accurate diagnosis, risk assessment, and early screening can deliver for patients and payers alike. Our industry-leading precision medicine technology curation — backed by 35+ years of diagnostic industry leadership and global market experience — ensures that every partner receives optimized diagnostic tool for their specific clinical and economic challenge.
Oncology
Infectious Disease
Autoimmune Disease
Cardiovascular Disease
NASH
Rare Disease
Women's Health
Precision Screening
Curiosity-driven
We ask the questions others don't, especially about why things don't work the way they should.
Outcome-focused
Every project connects back to a patient whose care will be better because of what we do.
Collaborative
We work across payers, developers, and employers simultaneously; siloed thinking doesn't get us far.
Join the Team
We hire for passion, not just credentials
Alva10 is a growing team unified by a belief that the biggest challenges in bringing diagnostics to patients are commercial — not scientific. We're looking for people who share that conviction and want to do something about it.
Interested in joining Alva10?
We hire based on team fit and passion to change healthcare. We're growing and looking for people ready to help move diagnostics to the forefront of patient care.
