Building a world
‍without heart disease.

Every year, more than 750,000 people will die from heart disease in the United States alone, good for roughly 1 in every 5 deaths or a death every 30 seconds. That’s larger than the entire population of Boston. Imagine seven sold-out NFL stadiums, suddenly empty. A moment of silence for each victim would require upwards of 16 months.

Year over year, heart disease remains the most common cause of death among all people, moreso than cancer or viral infection. In fact, heart disease has remained the most common cause of death for over a century now and a lot of very smart people don’t see this changing anytime soon. Heart disease suffers from an awareness problem, where a majority of Americans aren’t even aware that heart disease is the #1 killer. And a big part of that is probably people making the mistake of thinking they know what heart disease looks like.

Reality is the opposite though. Not everyone who dies of heart disease looks like they even have heart disease. Much of what we now know about heart disease is that it’s often silent and that symptoms often signal the end, not the beginning, of what heart disease progression even looks like. So how exactly did we get here?

Today’s standard of care was designed to work within the confines of a fee-for-service business model where payors and providers limit themselves to the management of chronic disease. On one hand, the underlying processes driving these chronic diseases have often been manifesting for years, decades even. On the other hand, our incentive structure effectively works on the basis of “wait until something breaks before you come and see us”.

For quite some time, heartcare was largely focused on a single essential question: how do we prevent you from dying because of something that is happening right now? Then over the past few decades, as scientific advances were made more broadly available to the public, we began to focus on a second, but related, question: how do we implement primary prevention so the things we are treating do not get worse?

We believe that the next great innovation in heartcare will come from answering a third, and perhaps final, question: what steps can we take to ensure cardiovascular disease never happens in the first place? In order to answer this question, we felt heartcare needed a way to dig deeper to find “ground truth”. Surely, we reasoned, there was a way we could find proof of disease far earlier and far more upstream than what is currently possible with today’s techniques and technologies. This wasn’t a question for AI, but a demand for something new.

The problem with a lot of conventional testing is the simple fact that the heart is remarkably resilient. As it turns out, that same resiliency gives the heart the deceptive ability to “hide” the very signs of dysfunction that might act as early indicators of future disease. So how, then, would we find the “invisible signal” we were looking for? As it turned out, the answer wasn’t waiting to be invented but uncovered, and it was hidden in a few 60-year old papers from two scientists at Syracuse. In 1963, Gerhard Baule and Richard McFee produced the first recording of the magnetic signal of the heart, an event that would later come to be recognized as the beginning of the field of magnetocardiography (or MCG).

Magnetocardiography has a few unique advantages. Its use requires zero emissions of any kind, radiation included. Its use also requires zero contact with sensors of any kind. The combo of these two things alone makes magnetocardiography ideal for routine, repeated measurements, no different from stepping onto a scale to weigh yourself or standing next to a ruler to measure your height.

Most importantly though, researchers have come to understand that magnetocardiography can produce a virtually undistorted, perfectly clean signal of your heart’s electrical activity, undisturbed by the surrounding skin, muscle, and organs which often make ECG so remarkably unreliable and difficult to interpret. The research around magnetocardiography, conducted not just by our teams but by many other teams of independent scientists across the past six decades, seems to point to a singular idea: the tiny, tiny magnetic field of the heart might just be our best way to “hear” when something in the heart goes wrong.

Enable People to Do Something, Do Something Earlier, and Do It Themselves

Our guiding mission with CardioFlux is to give people the power to understand how healthy their hearts really are by taking magnetocardiography – which we believe might be the world’s most sensitive instrument to cardiac function today – and making it available to everyone, everywhere. To do that, we’re focused on achieving two major things:

1. Enable broad, unlimited access to the power of magnetocardiography by combining newly advanced technologies with modern design principles to make machines that are widely accessible

2. Investigate and validate the use of magnetocardiography across broad sets of cardiovascular disease underserved by contemporary diagnostic pathways through investments in rigorous scientific research and methodologies

We want to see healthcare make the much-needed transition from treating patients to helping people, and we think magnetocardiography will play a key role in how we do this for people’s hearts.

We want people to use magnetocardiography and use it often. We want people to be able to measure changes in their heart itself, whether expected (due to changes in lifestyle and environment) or unexpected (due to the early development of dysfunctional behavior).

Indeed, technologies like magnetocardiography might have saved my maternal grandfather, Munshi, who suffered from decades of quiet but constant disease progression and agony. I watched him go from good to bad and bad to worse, subjected to countless pokes and prods across numerous hospital stays. His condition got irreversibly worse in his 70s, and although he would go on to live another 15 years, I’ve always felt that these “years” needed to be accompanied with a few air quotes. The honest truth is that while I had been blessed with many extra years with my grandfather, they were hardly the kinds of years any of us would want to live. I wish, not that we could have done more for him, but that we could have done things earlier, when changes might have made a difference.

Our goal, inspired by my own late grandfather’s journey through the healthcare systems of the time, is to give people a way to listen to their own hearts so they can take the opportunity to preserve their own heart health. We want to do work for people who will benefit the most from it, and to us, that means preventing disease by staying vigilant for its signs rather than simply waiting to diagnose it.