More than twenty years ago, my co-founder Dan and I caught the same bacterial infection and took the same standard course of antibiotics. My immune system cleared it, and I moved on without a scratch. Dan's immune system saw the same pathogen and started attacking his body.
He carries HLA-B27, a gene variant that changes how the immune system reacts to certain infections. One infection, two completely different lives, and the risks were already written in our genomes.
Dan has been living with chronic reactive arthritis ever since. For most of the years we spent building companies side by side, founding and growing a venture fund together, running at the same pace, I had no idea he was carrying such a heavy burden.
Around the same time, I witnessed my mother-in-law Myrto's challenging rheumatoid arthritis and Sjögren's journey, dismissed and under-served by a system that is not built for complexity. Her results sat in one clinic, her symptoms constantly evolving, and her clinicians trying one treatment after another hoping to eventually find the right combination.
Two of the people most important to me, and two halves of the same problem: the lack of coordinated, integrated care with continuous support between appointments.Thankfully both Myrto and Dan are in remission. It's taken more than twenty years, a great deal of trial and error, and eventually the right treatment for now. It should not take that long, and no one should suffer in silence.
Dan and I founded mOI because everyone deserves to understand what is happening in their body, to be heard when something is not right, and to have the people who love them beside them.