Jake Junkil Been

As human lifespan increases, brain disease also inevitably increase. This is because various brain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease, are associated with neurodegeneration through aging. Many brain diseases have no perfect treatment and destroy not only patients but also their families.

After Jake’s grandmother was diagnosed with Dementia and his parents moved to the countryside to care her, his life was dramatically changed. He felt that ‘founding a company’ would be a way to solve problems in the world and brain diseases are a serious problem to be solved. So, Jake invented ‘the next generation neuro navigation system’ at GIST (Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology) and founded NEUROPHET, Inc. with his partner and co-inventor, Dr. Donghyeon Kim, in 2016. Neurophet’s mission is to contribute to overcoming brain disease through advanced neurotechnologies.

Neurophet develops image-based diagnosis, treatment-planning software, and neuromodulation devices; from diagnosis to treatment for brain diseases. It commercialized several AI-based diagnostic solutions for Alzheimer’s disease and got medical device approval in Korea, Japan, Europe(CE-marked) and US (FDA-510k cleared). Neurophet’s advanced image-based diagnosis project, ‘ATNV system’, is challenging for subtyping, staging, and predicting Alzheimer’s disease at a large scale in South Korea. It is also having large scale clinical trials to target severe diseases which have no proper treatment such as Alzheimer’s disease, and stroke rehabilitation and MCS (Minimally Conscious State), by using the world's first medical purpose neuromodulation guide software. During these processes, Neurophet has raised 25M USD, hired about 100 people, and was selected as one of the top 19 promising AI startups in the healthcare field by Philips Healthwork’s ‘Ai in healthcare 2018."