Two leading entrepreneurs and investors in health technology companies, Dr. Maurice Ferré (Co-Founder and Chairman) and Christopher Dewey (Co-Founder), have concluded that skin cancer is primarily a public health issue that can be addressed by improving access to quality skin cancer treatment. Due to the limited number of dermatologists, their goal was to use advanced spectroscopy and machine learning technologies to improve the ability of front-line providers to detect skin cancer early.
They founded DermaSensor in 2009 after a discussion with Dr. Irving Bigio, a professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University and one of the world's leading spectroscopy researchers. Dr. Bigio is the first inventor and patentee of elastic scattering spectroscopy (ESS), a key technology used in the DermaSensor device.