Darrell Marshall, a Detroit native, discovered his passion for science at just five years old. Growing up in the challenging environment of 1980s and 1990s Detroit, raised by a single mother, he identified science as his guiding light, a journey that his mother consistently supported and nurtured.
“She used to tell me all the time, ‘Hey, you’re gonna do this, you can do whatever you want.’ And I just believed it. And I think in our community, a lot of times people don’t believe that to be true because they don’t see those examples, but I just really trusted my mom,” Marshall recalled during an interview with AfroTech.
Marshall earned a Bachelor of Science degree in analytical chemistry from Wayne State University in 2011. After, he pursued a doctorate in bioanalytical chemistry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where his thesis focused on “Combining nuclear magnetic resonance and mass spectrometry metabolomics for infectious disease.”
RELATED STORIES
In December 2016, he graduated and subsequently relocated to Buffalo, NY, in January to join a university-based startup focused on developing tools for early-stage ovarian cancer detection.
However, it was unsuccessful, leading him to return to Detroit in July. There, he took a position at another university-based startup, founded by a long-term mentor. He remained with this company until 2019, at which point he moved to a medical research firm specializing in assisting organizations with obtaining product approval from the Food and Drug Administration.
In 2021, Marshall, who was still working for the medical research company at the time, experienced a personal tragedy that served as a motivation for his new idea. His grandfather was placed on a ventilator an hour after being admitted to the hospital with a head injury but he died a month later from a hospital-acquired infection.
Marshall described the incident as “super traumatic.” That same year, he founded Total Analysis, a biotech startup, motivated by a desire to prevent other families from going through similar grief. He co-founded the company with Kristin Klaus (COO) and Fatema Bhinderwala (CTO).
“The reason why is after I talked to doctors and nurses, I found out that 90% of all germs are spread on surfaces. And I’m like, ‘Wait, we might be able to do something about this,’” Marshall said. “So I thought, ‘Hey, if we can detect those germs on surfaces, maybe we can tell the people that need to know early enough and they can prevent the spread of this.’
“As I started doing more research, I realized that this is a huge problem across many industries,” he added. “Different kinds of hospitals, but in safety net hospitals, specifically hospitals that service Black and brown people, typically it’s [up to] one out of 15 people that might walk into one of these safety net hospitals who will get one of these infections. And that just was too astronomical for me not to try to solve that problem.”
This resulted in Helios-1, a portable AI-powered device that can detect pathogens on-site in minutes. This process, as shared with AfroTech, does not require any laboratory or specialized training. The device is set to launch in Q4 2026, with an initial focus on agriculture and healthcare.
Marshall explained, “Typically, you have to send these samples out to different labs, and that can take days or hours, and there’s a lot of transportation, there’s a lot of different sample handling, a lot of different people touching the samples, and we want to kind of like prevent that and make that all like on-site.”
The device primarily detects bacteria, each with its own molecular fingerprint containing proteins, peptides, and DNA, which can be searched against Total Analysis’s database using machine learning.
“Our database was sampled in [the] lab, and if the database matches the bacteria out in the field, then we can say we got a positive hit,” Marshall explained.
Marshall has successfully raised close to $400,000 for the device, including a Phase 1 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Science Foundation.
He anticipates receiving about $2 million more from the foundation through an SBIR Phase 2 grant. Looking ahead, the ultimate aim for Helios-1 is its development into wearable technology, allowing people to detect germs as they go about their daily lives.
“We want to make it just your on-site pathogen detection, as normal as having an Apple Watch and looking at your heart rate and things,” Marshall explained.
