Former OpenAI Executive Taking On Chronic Disease Research, Including Her Own Condition
- What to look for
- You can see in detail how an OpenAI executive stepped down over a chronic disease and started a company, and how Chronicle Bio uses a blood biobank and large-scale biological data to stratify POTS, long COVID, and ME/CFS into subtypes.
- Why it matters
- It helps to understand the view that a chronic disease grouped under one diagnosis may actually consist of several subtypes, and how biobank data leads to finer diagnosis and new drug development.
AI summary
Forbes introduces former OpenAI executive Fiji Simo, who co-founded the startup Chronicle Bio to take on chronic immune diseases, including her own. Simo led applications and AGI deployment at OpenAI starting in May (month 5) 2025 but stepped down that July (month 7) and stayed on as an adviser after the postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) diagnosed 6 years earlier worsened. In March (month 3) 2025 she started the company with Rohit Gupta, who had led biobanks at Stanford and UCSF, and Rishi Reddi of Tarsadia Investments, with Gupta as CEO and Reddi as executive chairman. The company aims to uncover the biological differences behind the symptoms of chronic immune diseases such as POTS, long COVID, and ME/CFS known as chronic fatigue syndrome, and Gupta estimates that this group of conditions may affect 2 hundred-million 5 thousand ten-thousand people worldwide. It collects patient blood at sites in Utah, Arizona, and Texas in the United States and at a hospital in India, reaches homebound patients through mobile phlebotomy since August (month 8), and has gathered about 200 terabytes of data from more than 1,000 patients. From 4 ten-thousand stored specimen vials, it measures more than 10 hundred-million data points, including 2,000 metabolites and 1,000 proteins, to split patients currently grouped under a single diagnosis into subtypes. The company is at an early stage, having raised 2,000 ten-thousand dollars from investors including Brier Capital, and plans to raise more funds later this year or early next year. All directional outlooks are the speaker's conditional judgment and do not confirm any short-term price prediction.