The Blue Box

The Blue Box

About

The Blue Box is an innovative solution to address the pressing challenge of early breast cancer detection. Although breast cancer affects 1 in 8 women and is the most diagnosed cancer globally, only 34% of European women have biannual mammograms. Traditional mammograms often miss small tumours in younger women with dense breast tissue. Consequently, many European healthcare systems limit mammogram screenings to women aged 50-69. The Blue Box's, aim is to ensure comprehensive detection for women of all ages, using only a urine sample.

Team

Lidia Navarro Farré

Lidia Navarro Farré

University of California, Irvine

Lidia is a Building Engineer and has a Ph.D. in thermal energy storage systems for energy efficiency in buildings. During the PhD and postdoctoral years (2013-2018), she published 22 scientific papers. In 2018, she became a project manager in a consultancy, where she led and project-managed EU-funded translational science projects. She worked as an independent expert evaluator for the European Commission under Horizon Europe programme (2022). After completing an MBA she joined The Blue Box team. She now brings in her ability to translate an overarching goal into work packages, tasks, deliverables and key results, thus optimzing the team and funds.

Joan Vieyra Galí

Joan Vieyra Galí

University of California, Irvine

Joan is a Biomedical Engineer. He has completed an MSc in Technological Innovation in Health at the European Institute of Technology (2019), and an MSc in Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Barcelona (2019). He has grown specialized in MedTech innovation and medical device regulations. During his career, Joan has gained expertise in all insights of the development of biomedical devices from the basic scientific research, going through the project research and innovation, up until the validation of a product against regulations (design control). Joan has worked in an in-vitro diagnostics startup in Copenhagen and previously founded a startup, where he brought a medical device for sepsis detection from a concept stage to medical device regulations stage, as its CTO. He brings in his experience and his ability to de-risk the startup by being very data-driven.

Celia Mallafré Muro

Celia Mallafré Muro

University of California, Irvine

Celia is a Biochemist with an MSc in Omics Data Analysis (2018). In 2019, she started her PhD at the University of Barcelona. Her research interests include measurements techniques, chemometrics and data analysis on metabolomics datasets provided by chemical instrumentation for gas and VOC analysis such as e-noses and Gas Chromatography coupled to Ion Mobility Spectrometry (GC-IMS). Her PhD consisted on acquiring the metabolomic profile of urine using gas chromatography and eNoses, and analyzing the acquired datasets to detect cancer. She built an R (software) package for urine data processing and cancer detection. She brings in her experienced eye to design experiments to obtain data points that will be used to make company decisions, thus de-risking the company.

Judit Giró Benet

Judit Giró Benet

University of California, Irvine

Judit is a Biomedical Engineer. The fundamental activity of Judit Giró has been exclusively the management of the company since its creation. She worked as an associate engineer at Roche Diagnostics, Barcelona (Spain).In 2019, Judit was awarded a Balsells fellowship to pursue a master’s degree on Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). There she met Billy, and together they built The Blue Box’s first prototype as their master thesis during the summer of 2020. They co-founded the company in Jan 2021, but Billy left in early 2022. In her TEDx talk, Judit explains her main learnings so far.

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