Built by clinical scientists and technologists.
Designed for flow cytometry laboratories.

CytoTrax was founded by Jessica Hughes, a clinical flow cytometry scientist with more than 20 years of experience developing, validating, and supporting high-complexity diagnostic testing. Throughout her career, Jessica has worked in leading academic medical centers and healthcare institutions where precision, quality, and regulatory compliance are essential.

Her experience includes serving as:

• Flow Cytometry Technical Specialist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
• Flow Cytometry Supervisor at the VA San Diego Healthcare System
• Director of Flow Cytometry at IMD
• Flow Cytometry Staff Scientist at City of Hope

Jessica is also an active member of the International Clinical Cytometry Society (ICCS) and has authored multiple peer-reviewed publications in Cytometry Part B: Clinical Cytometry:

• Spurious binding of fluorochrome phycoerythrin-cyanine 5.5 (PE-Cy5.5) to B-cell lymphoma cells: A case study
• Peripheral blood plasmablasts, a potential confounder in CLL MRD analysis
• Plasma cells show decreased CD138 expression when exposed to buffers containing sodium azide

After decades of combined experience on both the bench and the systems side of the clinical lab, one problem remained remarkably consistent: critical reagent information was still being managed across disconnected spreadsheets, paper logs, and manual processes. Inventory tracking, quality control, lot management, cocktail preparation, and documentation often lived in separate systems, or no system at all.

CytoTrax was created to change that.

CytoTrax is co-founded and engineered by Bikash Panda, a healthcare technology executive with more than 20 years of experience architecting the Laboratory Information Systems that power high-complexity clinical diagnostics operations. Throughout his career, Bikash has built and owned the systems labs depend on to move from raw instrument data to reportable clinical results, with deep, hands-on focus on flow cytometry reporting alongside cytogenetics/FISH, molecular/NGS, and digital pathology.

His experience includes serving as:

• Director of IT & Systems at IMD, architecting the enterprise Laboratory Information System supporting flow cytometry and other advanced diagnostic modalities across a four-lab clinical operation
• Director of Technology at West Coast Pathology Labs, where he designed, built, and owned the complete Laboratory Information System for 17 years
• Lead Developer on Kaiser Permanente's enterprise Clinical Information System, building HL7 error-handling infrastructure used across the organization

His work has also spanned building end-to-end revenue cycle management platforms for insurance claims and patient billing, and leading cloud and AI transformation initiatives, including Azure hybrid cloud migrations and early work on AI-enabled healthcare applications.

As CTO, Bikash brings two decades of direct experience integrating flow cytometry reporting workflows into clinical LIS platforms — the same instrument-to-report pipeline that makes clean, well-documented reagent and QC data so essential upstream.