Mary Lou Jepsen is making mini-MRIs to peek inside the human body at Openwater

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• 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.

Brain
activity measured with an MRI.
shutterstock/MriMan

Openwater’s existing technology uses a combination of infrared,
cell-penetrating
laser beams plus two chips — one a camera and one ultrasonic — to
look inside the brain and body, Jepsen explained to Business
Insider in an interview on the sidelines of a conference held by
media group Techonomy in Half Moon Bay, California. 

The company is currently performing experiments on rats with
prototype versions of its technology at a lab space in the Bay
Area, said Jepsen. Already, the images they are able to create
are more accurate and better defined than what you’d see
with an MRI, she claimed.

Although she has not yet offered a public demonstration of the
technology, the company’s investors and board of directors
suggest strong scientific potential.

Jeff Huber,
the vice chairman and founding CEO of $1.6 billion
cancer-detecting Silicon Valley startup Grail, serves on
Openwater’s board of directors; Brook
Byers, a founding partner of venture capital firm Kleiner
Perkins (which has funded Genentech) is an Openwater investor,
along with Nicholas Negroponte,
the co-founder of the MIT Media Lab and Michael
McCullough, who directs the evolution and human behavior lab
at the University of Miami.

Jepsen’s ultimate goal is to get her product in people’s homes,
where they could be used to observe the effects of a
medication in real time or help monitor the progression of a
disease like cancer. 

“I want everyone to be able to buy these machines in the drug
store next to the blood pressure cuff,” Jepsen said.

From a storied career at Facebook and Google to her own startup

Jepsen spoke about her device at the 2017 Rock Health
Summit, but remained vague on details.
Rock Health

Jepsen pitched her project to tech giants Google and Facebook
before deciding to strike out on her own. She said the CEOs of
each company expressed an interest in the idea at first but
ultimately had her focus on other projects in virtual reality and
augmented reality. 

Her roles at both companies were high-level positions that were
heavy on engineering: at Google, Jepsen worked as the head of the
company’s display division within its secretive “X” division and
reported directly to Google co-founder Sergey Brin. At
Facebook, Jepsen served as the company’s executive director of
engineering and the head of display technologies at its virtual
reality arm Oculus.

But Jepsen, an engineer with a PhD in optical sciences from Brown
University, wanted to do more. 

“I like video games just as much as the next person,” Jepsen told
Business Insider, but their capacity to help people and make a
difference is limited, she said.

So last summer, Jepsen announced she was
leaving Facebook to create her own company, called
Openwater. 

‘You don’t have to biopsy if you can monitor’

Last year, Jepsen described
Openwater’s device as a new imaging technology that could
help “cure diseases” and could even be worn like a hat to see
inside the brain. Such a device could help researchers better
understand complex organs like the brain,
where some
aspects of mental
illnesses like depression can currently be observed using an
MRI.

For the process to work, timing is everything, Jepsen explained:
the ultrasonic pings are emitted first so that they arrive at the
same time as the infrared light, which is turned on shortly
after. The light changes color as it moves past various
structures in the brain or body — kind of like how the police
siren on a cop car changes pitch as it drives past you.

And the resulting image, which is produced through a combination
of the light and the ultrasonic pings, will be able to detect the
presence of a tumor, Jepsen said.

Jepsen’s company is also working with a nonprofit organization
called the Focused
Ultrasound Foundation, based in Charlottesville, Virginia. to
explore the possibility of someday using the technology for
non-invasive surgery using lasers, she added.

On Monday, Jepsen described one potential scenario for someone
with breast cancer. First, her mini-MRI could likely diagnose the
disease earlier because MRIs have 10 times the resolution of
mammograms, she said. Currently, MRIs
are recommended in addition to mammograms only for women with
a high risk of breast cancer.

But in addition, if the device could be worn (for example, as
part of a bra) it could be used to monitor the disease and any
tumors, allowing the patient and her clinician to decide on
surgery only when it was medically necessary, such as if the
tumor began to grow.

“You don’t have to biopsy if you can monitor,” Jepsen said.