Bob McEachern is a Follicular Lymphoma patient and advocate. Soon after his diagnosis in 2008, he started a blog to update family and friends about his condition. Years later, the blog continues to be a source of education and inspiration for FL patients and caregivers in over 80 countries. A writing teacher, Bob is a former columnist for Lymphoma News Today and a Community Advocate for Blood-Cancer.com, and has written about cancer and patient advocacy for The Mighty, Patients Have Power Magazine, and Media Commons, among other venues. He has served as a Consumer Reviewer for the Congressionally-Directed Medical Research Programs on peer-reviewed cancer research and rare cancers, and as a member of the HealtheVoices Impact Fund Advisory Board. He lives in Connecticut with his amazing wife and three kids, and slightly less amazing dog.
Daniel G. Garza has been a Patient Leader for about 20 years. He began his public speaking career after his AIDS diagnosis in September of 2000. He has lived Clean & Sober since June 21, 2007. After being diagnosed with Anal Cancer in May 2015, he had an Ostomy surgery in 2016, was diagnosed with Agoraphobia in 2017 and Diabetes in 2018. All of these events contributed to allowing those that hear his story and take a closer look at the long-term effects of HIV.
Daniel shares his story on social media, through several campaigns such as Positively Fearless, and volunteers for organizations such as Radiant Health Centers in Irvine California. He works with Wisdo as a Mentor, WEGO Health as a consultant and Global Healthy Living Organization as a member of the LGBT-COVID-19 Committee. Through his company Lilmesican Productions, Daniel and his partner, Christian, produce livestream content that is geared towards adding a positive message to their community.
Swatee Surve is the Founder & CEO of Litesprite, a mission-driven game platform that helps patients manage and mitigate the effects of mental health conditions, including substance abuse. As a healthcare technologist, she observed that individual motivation was the key to improving a person’s health. After reviewing numerous peer-reviewed research papers indicating that gaming could improve health outcomes, but finding limited commercialization efforts, she saw the opportunity to create Litesprite. Prior to founding Litesprite, she developed and launched disruptive technology-based healthcare businesses for Microsoft, Nike, T-Mobile, Premera Blue Cross and Eastman Kodak. These commercialization projects have led to several patents including Nike’s first wearable technology patent. She is one of Puget Sound Business Journal’s Innovators of the Year and is recognized as an international healthcare leader by organizations such as the U.S. State Department. She received her MBA from the University of Chicago, an MSME in Biomechanics from Pennsylvania State University, and a BS in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Tyler Matheny is the Cofounder and CEO of YANA, a social platform for the sober and curious. YANA’s mission is to inspire and empower people to live a happy and sober life by providing the tools, knowledge, and resources they need to get and stay sober. Tyler struggled immensely in his journey to sobriety and his calling in life has become helping others find a path to recovery that is simple to start, easy to understand, and with recovery on their own terms. Prior to founding YANA, Tyler spent more than 10 years as a senior marketing leader at several venture-backed startups in Austin, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay area. Through YANA, Tyler has been able to combine his passion for recovery advocacy with creative digital strategies to capture and engage his audience.
Beau Mann is the founder and CEO of Sober Grid, a digital community offering personalized, easy-to-access resources for tracking and sharing sobriety progress with others as well as giving and receiving support. With a background in tech, Beau is an entrepreneur, social advocate, and benefactor for causes helping serve those with mental illness, substance abuse and other disadvantaged populations. He is currently building three new technologies specific for addiction healthcare: a learning health system, artificial intelligence that predicts relapses, and (co-developing) a product that uses Virtual Reality to help individuals with substance use disorders. He is the Principal Investigator on these three projects funded by the National Institutes of Health and serves as a Principal Investigator on a National Science Foundation project where he is building a learning health system for addiction healthcare. Beau is in long-term recovery and enjoys conducting research to identify ways to use technology and artificial intelligence to help improve health outcomes through behavior modification.
Shay is a seasoned technology entrepreneur previously co-founding and serving as CEO of four companies: Seruus Telecom Fund, L.P. (1996), Trivergent (Nuvox) Communications (1997), UCI Communications (2003), and Green Cloud Technologies (2011). His expertise is creating recurring revenue-based services that are sold to enterprises and distributed through channel partners. Shay has significant experience raising capital (raised over $275mm through 30 transactions and filed for an IPO) and he has sourced and closed 20+ acquisitions. Shay is a 3x Inc. 500/5000 award winner from 2015-2017 with his time as CEO of Green Cloud Technologies. He is a graduate of The Citadel and serves on the business advisory board for The Citadel’s Baker School of Business. He is also in recovery and fueled by a passion to help others.
Richard Hanbury is the founder and CEO of Sana Health, an audiovisual technology allowing individuals to accelerate physical recovery and improve mental well-being to achieve a more restful state of mind. In 1992, Richard Hanbury survived a near fatal car accident, causing extreme nerve damage and leaving him with five years to live. Suffering in chronic pain, Richard began to experiment with the different neuromodulation patterns and bio-metric sensors to normalize his brain processed pain signals. His earliest prototype of Sana Health’s device successfully removed his nerve damage pain, and he has been pain-free since 1993. Richard is a former McKinsey associate and co-founded the estate agency software system, Easymatch. He received his MBA from Wharton in Healthcare and Entrepreneurial Studies and diploma in law CPE from College of Law
Marisa Barbieri is the CEO and Digital Health Solutions Architect at Competitive Solutions, a healthcare technology company based in New York, with over 20 years of healthcare IT technology solutions experience in the consulting industry. At Competitive Solutions, she has designed and developed PeerRX, a tool to accelerate and streamline peer support deployment for substance user disorder patients in order to increase peer recovery engagement. Marisa developed the product in direct response to the loss of a family friend from an overdose. After seeing him struggle as a young 27-year old, she saw the need for the development of an Uber-like technology to connect those battling with addiction to other survivor peers. PeerRX was born 2 years following her family friend’s death, in his memory, and with the hope of saving the lives of others struggling with substance use disorder. Marisa holds an MS in Computer Science / Telecommunications Management from NYU’s Polytechnic School of Engineering.
The Winner
Lief Therapeutics
Rohan Dixit is founder and CEO of Lief Therapeutics, a mental health telemedicine company built around a breakthrough wearable device. Formerly a Harvard and Stanford neuroscientist, his work has been featured on The Today Show, CNBC, NBC, and CBS, and in The Atlantic and Forbes magazine. His primary focus for the past 13 years has been the intersection between mind-body interventions, science, and technology. As a repeat healthcare entrepreneur, Rohan has created wearable device products that monitor and augment mind-body interventions and have been used by thousands of consumers and patients.
Rohan Dixit
Founder and CEO
ABOUT THE INNOVATION CHALLENGE
Patient Entrepreneurs with innovative companies in early stages of development will receive an invitation to pitch their solutions to an expert panel of judges comprised of healthcare industry, medical and patient leaders.
The winner will be awarded a $25,000 monetary grant. Additionally, competing finalists will be considered for possible partnerships/investments with/by Orexo.
The Lyfebulb–Orexo Innovation Challenge stems from the idea of the Lyfebulb Entrepreneur Circle, established in 2015, and features individuals who have created a product and a company based on issues encountered due to their personal experiences with a chronic illness (through their own diagnosis or that of a loved one).
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Honorable Mention
I Ally
When Lucinda became her father’s caregiver at a young age, she struggled with the lack of resources available to her. Taking matters into her own hands, she created I Ally, an app for family caregivers that provides access to mutual aid, mental health services, financial & legal counsel, and peer support. She is a Founding Member of Tech Ladies, owns the social media marketing agency Got It Done Gal, and premiered a short film, Laura Point, at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016. Mrs. Koza is a committed advocate, speaker and thought leader on family caregiving, being a young caregiver, and the role of digital healthcare technology in transforming patient experience.
Lyfebulb is a chronic disease-focused, patient empowerment platform that connects patients and industry to support user-driven innovation. Grounded with its strong foundation in diabetes, the company has expanded disease states covered into cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis, mental health, migraine, transplantation, and chronic cough.
Orexo DTx is the digital health arm of Orexo AB, a pharmaceutical company that develops and commercializes improved pharmaceuticals and digital therapies. The company addresses unmet needs mainly within the growing space of addiction. Orexo DTx was created in Q4 of 2019 and currently has three products in the pipeline, vorvida® for alcohol misuse, deprexis® for depression, and OXD01 for opioid use disorder, all in partnership with the GAIA group.
Orexo DTx’s mission is to redefine treatment of addiction by offering clinically validated digital therapeutics to ensure more successful treatment for patients and cost-effective solutions for payers. The digital products will be commercialized by Orexo DTx worldwide, with the U.S. as the principal market, where Orexo also commercializes its lead product Zubsolv® (buprenorphine and naloxone) sublingual tablets (CIII) for treatment of opioid use disorder.
Orexo is listed on the Nasdaq Stockholm Mid Cap (ORX) and is available as ADRs on OTCQX (ORXOY) in the U.S. The company is headquartered in Uppsala, Sweden, where research and development activities are performed.
Join us for an informal, chat-style discussion between two Lyfebulb community members in recovery, Rebecca Rush & Lisa Smith, lightly moderated by Lyfebulb CEO Karin Hehenberger, MD, PhD. We are all living during unprecedented times created by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has posed particular challenges for the addiction recovery community. Do you want to hear how others in recovery have adapted to the new normal? This event, part of our fireside chat series, will spotlight innovative solutions and adaptations for a quarantined reality in order to maintain recovery. We will be sure to discuss today’s addiction and recovery landscape as a whole, so we encourage you to submit any specific discussion topics or questions that you’d like us to cover!
See the replay here:
Time: Aug 26, 2020 04:30 PM EST
“Part of adapting to the conditions of the pandemic has meant refocusing the tools I rely on for accountability and keeping to a routine. In this context, this may mean pulling out different tools than you are used to relying on.” – Lisa Smith
