From Business Insider:
- A brush with death inspired ex-Facebook and Google executive Mary Lou Jepsen to embark on her latest initiative as the founder of a San Francisco-based startup called Openwater.
-
Jepsen is working on devices that are akin to portable, miniature MRIs
which could do everything from observing the effects of a medication in
real time to monitoring a breast cancer tumor to decide if surgery is
necessary.
- Her startup is currently running experiments on rats in a lab in the San Francisco area, she told Business Insider.
Former Google and Facebook executive
Mary Lou Jepsen
was in her 20s when she went home to die. What began with terrible
headaches developed into fatigue so severe she had to use a wheelchair.
She'd lost control of movement in half of her face.
It
took several months and a handful of doctors before someone recommended
that Jepsen get an MRI — a procedure that that lets clinicians peek
inside the brain, but that can cost thousands of dollars and is
performed exclusively on a two-ton machine in a special room, often at a
hospital. The pricey devices use radio waves and strong magnets to
create pictures of organs and structures inside the body.
Thanks to Jepsen's MRI, she was diagnosed with a deadly brain tumor just in time to save her life.
Jepsen's brush with death drove her to create a startup called Openwater.
Its mission is to make portable, miniature imaging machines that
everyone can afford — machines that she dreams will one day harbor the
power to do everything from detect tumors in any organ to allow for
brain-to-brain communication. If it works, her technology could disrupt
the roughly
$6 billion annual MRI market. ...
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