Young Marios Paphitis grew up in a family tied to the land and animals and learned respect for the environment. Issues related to health gave rise to the same sensitivities.
If he had a ‘strong stomach’ he would have followed the profession of a doctor. However, he chose to combine computer science, which had impressed him since he was a child, with entrepreneurship and social responsibility, because he felt it was his duty to give back to society what he had learned. In his thesis, he worked on the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, and there he realized that even though he is not a doctor, he can use his own knowledge to improve methods of diagnosing diseases through artificial intelligence.
Today, he has two start-up companies under his belt, Fooderloo, which helps reduce food waste, and MammoCheck, which allows women to carry out breast cancer screening at home.
Late diagnosis of breast cancer can even lead to death. Unfortunately, women think that their risk of breast cancer starts after 45. In fact, 1 in 10 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer before they even turn 45. At the same time, women who have mammograms think that a screening every 2-3 years is safe. However, 1 in 8 mammograms will say the woman is healthy but in reality, she is not.
With these facts and with the encouragement of his professor Andreas Konstantinidis during his Master’s degree in Web & Smart Systems at Frederick University, he participated in the Junior Achievement Cyprus program Beyond Pre-Accelerator in 2021, for the creation of business ideas against cancer! Together with his team, Alexandra Dimitriadou and Athena Grigoriou, they created MammoCheck, a startup that allows women to get checked for breast cancer at home.
The aim of MammoCheck is to enable women to be checked at home painlessly, easily, and quickly, without exposure to dangerous radiation. Through a device that will be connected to their mobile phone and through an intelligent algorithm with extreme precision, women will automatically have a status of their breast health. As Marios explains, MammoCheck does not aspire to replace mammography but to fill the gap of early diagnosis.
