Meet the nextGEN
Judit Giró Benet - The Blue Box Biomedical Solutions
What is your personal story of how you ended up in the life sciences?
My family is my greatest inspiration. My father is an engineer and my mother and sister are psychologists. So at home, we have always been very engineering-oriented, but with a focus on humans and human lives.
I really liked physics and maths as a kid, but I never said it out loud. Back then, it was not ‘cool’ to enjoy these subjects. I always knew I would work in something related to maths when I grew up, but I didn’t know the name of that job. Every time I heard about the typical jobs people had, I couldn’t relate to any of them.
Then, one day at a student fair I learned that there was a new degree at some universities called biomedical engineering. It sounded perfect for me. I could continue with maths while solving problems related to the best machine that exists: the human body.
For me, studying biomedical engineering was the greatest privilege in the world. I loved the subject of electronics and I loved modeling the body as a pool of data that we could later process to predict diseases and ultimately save lives. But I was also frustrated that we were only doing this in class and there were still so many people dying of diseases.
That frustration came to an end at a conference when I heard that dogs could smell cancer. It was something to learn from and to keep digging into. I discovered that a lot of European research groups were already studying electronic noses and a lot of developments were happening at the time.
For my bachelor’s thesis, I persuaded my electronics professor to allow me to develop a proof of concept for an electronic nose that could detect breast cancer from urine samples. I also convinced a doctor from a local hospital to give us urine samples from patients. We discovered that our device actually worked a lot better than we expected.
The results made me want to work on the device further. However, I still lacked the knowledge to build such a complex system. I applied for a fellowship to go to the US and study at the University of California Irvine, where I did a master's in Embedded Cyber-Physical Systems.
California was the dream place for innovation and for any biomedical engineer. I met Po-an (Billy) Chen, my co-founder, who has now left the company. Together, we did a master thesis on an evolution of the breast cancer detection device, which we called The Blue Box. We added AI into the cyber-physical system, allowing data to be sent to the cloud. We also included a better processor and improved our results, which landed us a publication in the journal Nature.
After finishing my master’s, I went back to Barcelona and we founded the company. After that, it stopped being a research project. We validated the technology. Our sensitivity for breast cancer detection is now over 88%, positioning the Blue Box as a promising future tool for breast cancer screening.
In total, we have raised €1,5M from investors and grants and awards. We’re deploying these funds to industrialize the technology, which we’ll achieve in the first quarter of next year. Having reached that point, we will spend next year doing clinical trials before we enter the market.
As quite a young founder and CEO, have you ever been challenged because of your age?
I never planned to become a founder or CEO. I just took this road because every decision I made was a response to the frustration that women are dying of cancer when they shouldn't be. To me, moving forward with The Blue Box was the most obvious thing to do.
My age can be a challenge sometimes, but it can also be an advantage. I am young, so I have more flexibility to experiment or to work longer at night if I have to. I have a big network of family and friends who always support me. To me, they are a key asset to being a CEO and founder.
Of course, being young has some drawbacks. I have less experience than I will have in 20 years, but I can learn fast and I have very good mentors helping me.
Judit’s full profile is available for our members inside the community.