Feb 8, 2022 Entrepreneurship Impact Spotlights News and Events From Plastic Surgeon-in-Training to Inventor: How a Family Tragedy Led One Latina to Improve Lung Disease Diagnosis for the World
Maria Artunduaga is the CEO and founder of Samay, a successful startup aimed at providing low-cost, at-home diagnostics for dangerous respiratory conditions.
At age 34, Maria Artunduaga took a leap of faith. Ambitious and focused, she was studying plastic surgery — a highly competitive specialty — at University of Chicago Medicine, on track to become a reconstructive plastic surgeon for children. Then, back home in her native Colombia, Artunduaga’s beloved grandmother, Sylvia, died. The cause of death was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, a condition involving constriction of the airways and difficulty breathing. Artunduaga and her family, many of whom are physicians, were devastated — and exasperated. “It was extremely frustrating and disappointing that nowhere in the world can respiratory patients monitor their lung function when they are outside of a hospital,” she said. So, Artunduaga made a radical decision. She abandoned her burgeoning career in clinical medicine to start a company centered on a solution for the problem that took her grandmother’s life. As an ambitious Latina, she says, she wasn’t willing to wait for another generation.
