Padideh Kamali-Zare

Alzheimer’s disease might be easier to treat if it were easier to detect—especially years or decades earlier, before memory loss or other symptoms become visible. That’s what Padideh Kamali-Zare is trying to do at Darmiyan, a biotech startup that uses artificial intelligence to analyze MRIs, looking for early evidence of microscopic changes in brain tissue. Kamali-Zare, age 39, has a Ph.D. in biological physics and was a neuroscience researcher at New York University before founding Darmiyan in 2016. (Her company’s name means “in between” in Persian, the language spoken by her grandmother, who developed Alzheimer’s.) In April, Darmiyan raised $6 million in seed funding from investors led by Japanese pharmaceutical company Eisai.