Harbinger Health Strengthens Leadership Team and Board of Directors
Executive appointments include Matt Turner as President and Hutan Ashrafian, M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A., as Chief Medical Officer
Ajit Singh, M.S., Ph.D., joins Board of Directors
Additions of industry leaders in clinical development, cancer research and market entry strengthen executive team and Board
Cambridge, Mass., April 22, 2025 – Harbinger Health, a biotechnology company pioneering the detection of early cancer, today announced the appointments of Matt Turner as President and Hutan Ashrafian, M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A., as Chief Medical Officer (CMO). Bringing this depth of expertise to the executive team will position the Company for its next phase of growth with a focus on developing and bringing to market diagnostic and screening products for blood-based early cancer detection.
Additionally, Ajit Singh, M.S., Ph.D., will join Harbinger’s Board of Directors. Dr. Singh is a partner at Artiman Ventures with extensive expertise leading and advising healthcare organizations across the public and private sectors.
“Both Matt and Hutan bring critical experience to our executive team as we prepare to deliver our first products to clinicians and patients in need of highly accurate, clinically relevant, and accessible means of detecting cancer in its earliest stages,” said Stephen Hahn, M.D., CEO, Harbinger. “Matt is an experienced leader who knows how to build successful businesses and product teams in innovative and growth industries. Hutan will be instrumental in clinical evidence generation as we amass the data to support the use of our products in multiple clinical settings and cancer indications. Together with the board and the other members of the executive team, I look forward to working with Matt and Hutan as we realize the potential of the technology platform we have built and validated over the past four years.”
“We are pleased to welcome Ajit to Harbinger’s board where his extensive experience leading cancer companies and bringing diagnostic tools to market will be beneficial to the future direction of the company,” said Doug Cole, M.D., Co-Founder and Chairman, Harbinger Health and Managing Partner, Flagship Pioneering. “Harbinger was founded to create a product development engine capable of addressing any number of challenges related to effective screening, diagnosis and management of cancer and, as the company advances toward commercial readiness, we have assembled a board and executive team with the requisite skills, expertise and passion to establish Harbinger as a market leader.”
- Matt Turner joins Harbinger as President responsible for translating the company’s strategic vision and mission into effective operational strategies and measurable outcomes based on 20+ years of experience developing and leading business units and product teams in the life sciences, diagnostics, medical device and energy sectors. Most recently, Mr. Turner spent more than 6 years at Danaher Corporation where he successively ran three businesses, including Phenomenex, an analytical chemistry company that primarily supported pharmaceutical therapeutic development, and Ormco, an orthodontic medical device business that rapidly launched and grew an FDA approved product into a market leading position. Prior to Danaher, he spent 12 years at General Electric (GE) in a variety of executive roles including sales, project management, product management, operations and quality. Mr. Turner started his career as an US Air Force Intelligence Officer where he focused on Europe, Middle East and Africa.
- Hutan Ashrafian has been appointed Chief Medical Officer and brings a wealth of expertise developing innovative biomedical and technical solutions for significant health problems, particularly in the domain of applying AI to medicine. Dr. Ashrafian has provided pivotal guidance on the development and execution of Harbinger’s clinical strategy since the Company’s founding within Flagship Pioneering’s Preemptive Health and Medicine initiative. A senior clinician-scientist and surgeon by training, he has held multiple scientific and clinical positions at Imperial College London, Leeds Business School, and the NHS Foundation among others. His wide-ranging work has been published in over 650 peer-reviewed papers in a variety of leading journals, including Nature, The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine.
- Ajit Singh brings over 30 years of experience in developing and scaling companies, healthcare transactions and scientific research to Harbinger’s Board. In addition to his role at Artiman Ventures, he is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford School of Medicine. Previously, Dr. Singh served as the CEO of BioImagene, a cancer diagnostics startup acquired by Roche in 2010, and the global CEO of Siemens Oncology and Siemens Imaging Systems. Dr. Singh joins seven existing Board directors with decades of collective experience across the healthcare industry and in cancer research, including Doug Cole, M.D., Lord Ara Darzi, M.D., Margo Georgiadis, Stephen Hahn, M.D., Michael Nally, M.B.A., Stephen H. Rusckowski Mark Stevenson, M.B.A., and Travis Wilson.
About Harbinger Health
Harbinger Health is pioneering the detection of early cancer and enabling foundationally new approaches to cancer screening, diagnosis and management. The company combines advances in artificial intelligence with proprietary insights into the biology of the beginnings of cancer to identify cancer before it is visible or symptomatic with the aim of developing low-cost, multi-cancer blood tests. Harbinger envisions a future where, instead of keeping cancer from spreading, it could be kept from forming, making a cancer diagnosis a routine health problem to be addressed rather than a life-altering event to be feared with profound implications for people, healthcare systems and societies. Harbinger was founded by Flagship Pioneering after three years of foundational research in its Labs unit and launched in 2020. Learn more about Harbinger by visiting www.harbinger-health.com or following us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
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