Emma Eisenhauer, Mansi Katarey, and Ciara Sejour
Hey there! We’re Ciara, Emma, and Mansi, and we’ve been building PeeZe since July 2022.
A bit about us:
I’m Ciara, a 15 y/o based out of Maryland. I’m interested in leveraging emerging technologies to solve the world biggest problems. My main interests lie within Biotech and EdTech, but I love exploring new things! Outside of PeeZe, I intern Kira Learning, an EdTech start-up, co-host a podcast featuring different emerging technologies, and enjoy playing basketball.
I’m Emma, a 16 y/o innovator and entrepreneur based out of Boston, MA. I’m passionate about using IoT and robotics to efficiently solve big problems in our world, specifically in disease detection & monitoring. Outside of PeeZe, you can find me running my robotics 501(c)(3) nonprofit or in the ocean surfing!
I’m Mansi! I’m 17 y/o based out of Toronto, ON. My passions lie in the Internet of Things + Artificial Intelligence and how these technologies can be leveraged to with disease monitoring. Beyond this project, I’m a black stripe in taekwondo and host a podcast called Re:mind.
<aside> ⚠️ Problem Statement: In the US, of the 21,000 new cases of ovarian cancer diagnosed each year, about 80% of those patients in remission will have a relapse that may be caught too late because there is currently no reliable at-home testing for ovarian cancer recurrence. 70% of ovarian cancer patients who have a recurrence won’t live more than 5 years.
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Ovarian cancer is the most lethal of all gynecological cancers with over 4 million people dying every year. However, when looking at remission statistics for ovarian cancer, it doesn’t seem as though it should be the most lethal. In fact, 80% of women diagnosed with ovarian cancer will make it to the remission (”cancer-free”) stage (compared to pancreatic cancer’s remission rate of 10%).
So where are all these deaths coming from?
80% of women in remission from ovarian cancer will relapse at some point in their lives. Ovarian cancer has the second-highest remission rate of any cancer. This means relapsing is something most ovarian cancer patients fear for the rest of their lives. Since 29% of cancer patients in remission don’t regularly comply with follow-up care, many cancer patients’ cancers are caught much too late for secondary treatment to be effective.
Ovarian cancer patients have to get their CA125 levels checked about every 10 days in between receiving chemotherapy through a blood serum test so doctors can see how their cancer is reacting to the chemotherapy. Ovarian cancer patients in remission need to go in for a CA125 level test every 1 to 2 months for the rest of their lives. These tests involve driving to a hospital or outpatient facility, waiting to be seen, undergoing a painful & invasive test, using needles and prep pads, and overall wasting valuable time. Not to mention these tests take time for the results to come back and are only accurate for that day or so; they don’t monitor in real-time.
There is currently no seamless, non-invasive, at-home method for cancer patients to monitor their cancer biomarkers.
<aside> 💡 Our Solution: Pregnancy tests for ovarian cancer.
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Over the last 3 months, we've focused our research on biosensors. The technology itself is very broad, so we spent most of the 3 months trying to narrow down which biosensor would be best for the PeeZe sensor and how we could change it to best fit the needs of the sensor we envision creating.