What Would Any Parent Do?

Jane Zhang’s (’20) preschool-aged son was ill. In and out of pediatricians’ offices and acute care clinics, he had been diagnosed with an ear infection and given antibiotics. Still, he wasn’t getting better.

During one visit, the doctor showed her the back of her son’s throat. She saw blisters. According to the doctor, those indicated that her son was suffering from something other than an ear infection. Then he made a comment that changed her life: He told her she could be the one looking at her son’s throat for symptoms like this.

“It was a moment of revelation,” she says. “I have that power. I should be able to do this.”

Exhausted by all the doctor’s office visits, Zhang did what any parent would do. She sought a solution.

Unlike many other parents, though, Zhang has a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering, employment history in development and sales of medical devices, and a 3D printer in her garage.

With that printer, Zhang created the prototype of what has become Remmie, a device that patients and their families can use from home to collect images of the inner ear and throat. The prototype was an attachment that fit over a phone and used the phone’s flashlight and camera. According to Zhang, the device can help patients be diagnosed more quickly and avoid unnecessary emergency visits.

In addition to helping parents, the Remmie device also helped set the course for Zhang’s MBA studies at UCLA Anderson.

Earlier in her career, Zhang had worked in research laboratories, helping to develop health diagnostic technologies. She began considering MBA programs after she’d transitioned from research to the commercial side, working as a consultant for companies developing health care technologies and bringing their products to market. She hoped an MBA would give her more in-depth knowledge of business strategies.

Zhang also believed she could leverage her biomedical engineering knowledge to “make some pretty good judgment calls within early-stage investment decisions” and was considering whether a career in venture capital or as an entrepreneur might be in her future.

During her first year, Zhang was accepted into the Anderson Venture Accelerator program. She also earned the Deutschman Venture Fellowship and Fully Employed MBA Fellowship. Along with a team of Anderson classmates, Zhang was a finalist in the Knapp Venture Competition for their work on what eventually became Remmie.

That early success helped drive Zhang further in the direction of entrepreneurship. “I was getting a lot of good feedback right in the beginning, and that’s what propelled us to move on to do a deeper dive in the second year, focusing on the entrepreneur track, building out the business plan, forming a more in-depth team with a lot more market research efforts,” she recalls. “The Accelerator was a very, very good resource.”

Zhang and her classmates continued to develop the device. Because phone cameras are continually evolving and it was difficult to create a one-size-fits-all solution, they changed it to a standalone device called an otoscope. Otoscopes are commonly used by doctors to see into patients’ throats and ears using a light and lens. Zhang reasoned, “If patients are already using thermometers, they should be able to take otoscope measurements as well.”

By the time she graduated, Zhang’s team had been offered $100,000 in venture capital funding and reached an inflection point. The funding was conditional on all team members’ coming on full-time, a difficult ask for a project still in its infancy and of teammates who had full-time jobs. Zhang was the only one who ended up taking the leap; without the rest of her original team, the funding for the project was reduced.

Fortunately for Zhang, the timing was right for a startup like Remmie. People were getting used to relying on selfies for various types of measurements. With the pandemic, the use of telehealth skyrocketed.

Nearly four years later, Remmie continues to attract investors. The company participated in the United Healthcare Accelerator, a four-month program for healthcare entrepreneurs. It also has funding from the National Institutes of Health’s Small Business Innovation Research fund. Along with Zhang, there are now five full-time and 10 part-time employees.

Released in the fall of 2023, a third-generation version of Remmie uses an LED and camera. The device also includes a compatible app and a Wi-Fi direct connection so it can connect to a user’s phone even without reliable internet service nearby. A patient can send photos and videos to a healthcare provider by copying and pasting an app-generated URL into the chat on any telehealth platform.

Zhang and her team are now working on ways to incorporate artificial intelligence into the device. Currently, the Remmie app provides AI guidance on what to look for in a patient’s ears and throat. “That’s the feature that we recently implemented that enables the user to identify a good place for taking a photo. A layperson probably has never seen an eardrum and they don’t even know if they’re taking a photo of something of necessity,” she notes.

Remmie is not currently approved by the Food & Drug Administration as a diagnostic device but, Zhang says, “The next step is diagnosis. We’re building out the AI so that it can identify diseases and features indicative of diseases.”

The fact that Zhang, even with advanced technical degrees and a job developing diagnostic devices, had such difficulty with her own son’s illness is not lost on her. “If I’m a Ph.D. in biomedical diagnostics and I’m lacking support, think about how many others are suffering,” she says.

The third-generation Remmie has a retail price point of around $149. Zhang hopes the device will eventually be widely covered by insurance, which she says is “socially beneficial to the underserved population.”

Zhang credits what she learned at UCLA Anderson with closing the loop between her research background and the skills and knowledge she needs as an entrepreneur.

“It’s hard to go from a researcher’s mindset — someone who was really interested in the science, who was wanting to dive deeper into the technology — to pull back to reality in terms of financial outcomes. How can we make money? How can we extract value for the users?” Zhang says. “I think that the learning from the MBA was the power of financing, the power of market research, building the proper marketing and infrastructure around this in steps and phases, and also in terms of product management.”

Zhang’s son is now a healthy third grader. He takes pride in her pitch deck, which features a photo of him taken around the time she was shuttling him to seemingly endless doctor visits. She describes him as “kind of a stakeholder” as she works to make remote treatment accessible to other patients. “He knows what I’m trying to do for him, and for all the other kids.”