April 28, 2025
Sarah Kehoe’s desire to help save lives through science started in an unexpected place—on horseback. Yet her youthful zeal led her to where she is today, part of a team leading innovation for Danaher Diagnostics and driving life-saving diagnostic testing for patients all over the world. What she didn’t know is that one of the lives that Danaher Diagnostics’ technologies would eventually touch would be her own.
As a teenager, Sarah spent several years giving riding lessons at Camp Fantastic—a week-long adventure camp for children with cancer. Sarah’s time with the kids sparked strong empathy for patients and a strong desire to find a cure for cancer, which motivated her to get a PhD in Molecular Cell Biology from the University of Florida.
Sarah Kehoe, Vice President, Execution & Process Excellence
After graduate school, Sarah started her career as a group leader in clinical genomics for the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, identifying cancer patients with druggable DNA mutations and matching them to treatments that would target those mutations. A few years later, she transitioned to industry—joining Beckman Coulter (a Danaher Diagnostics business) as a senior clinical studies scientist supporting genomics. In this role, Sarah worked with clinicians and researchers worldwide to sequence patient DNA and RNA, and bioinformatically analyze the data to reveal insights into genomic root causes of patient disease.
“I wanted to scale patient impact globally—beyond a single hospital’s patient population,” she said. “Since then, my journey has evolved to focus on additional disease states, not only cancer, because Danaher capabilities can help clinicians move the needle on many diagnostically preventable deaths. As I became a people leader, I realized it’s about force multiplication. The way to make an impact is by partnering as a team and growing future leaders, not followers. Together, we can play a bigger role than going it alone.”
After a series of career moves within Danaher, Sarah now serves as Vice President, Execution & Process Excellence within the Chief Innovation Office for Danaher Diagnostics (one of Danaher’s three platforms).
“My work involves leading innovation programs and teams focused on developing novel diagnostics for neurodegenerative disease, infectious disease and cancer to enable precision medicine,” she said.
For example, Sarah’s team has been involved in executing Danaher’s diagnostics-focused Beacons programs, which invest in pioneering academic research to impact human health.
Hear Sarah speak about how Danaher Diagnostics’ work is making an impact in the world
Over the years, Sarah has seen Danaher’s technology at work in many exciting ways. One example was at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, Sarah’s team was using a blood analyzer from Beckman Coulter to do a sepsis study at Mass General Hospital in Boston. When COVID-19 hit and children started getting multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C)—a rare but deadly condition that can develop weeks after an initial SARS-CoV-2 infection—Danaher was right there to pivot and begin studies to understand why.
“Our principal investigators wheeled the instrument down the hall and started an IRB-compliant clinical study for MIS-C because they realized monocyte distribution width (MDW)—the same biomarker we were using as an early indicator of sepsis—is also an early warning light for MIS-C,” said Kehoe. “This led us to winning almost $1 million in BARDA government funding to do a MIS-C study in kids. This was all because of our principal investigator’s awareness of how our devices could help children with this rare condition.”
Sarah went on to co-author that MIS-C study in 2022.
More recently, Sarah witnessed the pivotal role that diagnostic testing plays in improving patient outcomes in a much more personal way. In December 2024, she got a severe case of meningitis, which put her in the hospital for eight days.
“During that experience, I had a massively broad barrage of diagnostic tests run as part of my treatment plan, many of which leveraged Danaher’s diagnostic tests being run at the hospital’s core lab and at send-out reference labs, including IVD tests from Beckman Coulter, Cepheid and Radiometer,” she said. “This personal patient experience really solidified in my mind how heavily reliant clinicians are on diagnostics to save patient lives. Diagnostics provides a window into the biological problems going on in the body, and without this, doctors cannot intervene with the right life-saving treatments at the right time. After a brief medical leave, I returned to work with a renewed passion and sense of purpose for the work we do at Danaher every day.”
Today, Sarah is back to full health and excited about the future. What started as a dream to help cure cancer, has led Sarah to where she is today—in a thriving, satisfying career that impacts lives all around the globe.
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