Friday, November 21, 2008

Tech Citizenship

Atalasoft CEO connects with tumor sufferers through Brain Trust

By Galen Moore

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After Samantha Scolamiero underwent successful surgery in 1990 to remove a cyst from her brain, doctors told her she was going to be able to live a normal life. Instead, the daughter of an MIT researcher became a couch potato.

“I used to have a Pentium 5 brain, and I was now a 386,” she said, referring to the Intel386, a microprocessor introduced in the late 1980s. “And what happens with a 386? If you open too many windows, it crashes,” she said.

At the time, support groups for internal brain injury survivors were almost nonexistent. Scolamiero set up a listserv that grew into The Healing Exchange Brain Trust (T.H.E. Brain Trust), an online support group based in Somerville that now serves 3,000 people.

Scolamiero went through the experience of dealing with a brain injury alone — but because of that, Atalasoft Inc. founder Bill Bither and his family didn’t have to go it alone. By 2004, Bither’s Easthampton-based imaging software company was growing fast. That year, his father, William Bither II, was diagnosed with stage four glioblastoma, a terminal brain tumor. He died just six months later.

“When you first go to the Internet and you search for something like that, it’s pretty negative. And there’s not a lot of things that are positive about it anyway,” Bill Bither said. “When you go to Braintrust.org, you can connect to a support group and understand that there’s actually a lot of people affected by this. You’re not the only one around.”

Batcheye sales, Brain Trust’s gain
Two years ago, Bither had to make a decision about what to do with his original product, a mass digital-image processing software called EyeBatch. The product was still selling well, but Atalasoft had shifted its focus to other areas. So, Bither decided to donate the entire proceeds from future EyeBatch sales to T.H.E. Brain Trust.

Although it’s had few recent upgrades, EyeBatch still typically sells a couple of licenses per day, Bither said. A single license costs $59.

It’s become a steady source of income, allowing the barebones Brain Trust to think about new ways to reach people — such as moving its servers to a better e-mail platform or adding digital video to its website.
“We have been so grassroots, we have not had adequate funding to pay staff,” Scolamiero said. “In fact, I’m still a volunteer.”

T.H.E. Brain Trust isn’t the only brain injury organization in the Boston area that depends on the local high-tech community for support.

“It’s hugely important to us,” said Charles Jennings, spokesman at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. “A substantial part of our budget comes from philanthropic contributions. That’s becoming increasingly important as federal grant money decreases.”

The center was founded in 2000 with a donation from Framingham-based International Data Group Inc. founder and chairman Patrick J. McGovern Jr., and his wife, entrepreneur Lore Harp McGovern.

Serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist Robert Metcalfe, a partner at Polaris Venture Partners, said the McGovern Institute is one of about 10 MIT institutions to which he donates. “There could be 100, but there’s only 10 because life is short,” he said. “MIT is one of the leading, if not the leading, science and technology universities in the world. If we’re going to make any progress — as we are making progress — in the curing of disease, then science and technology are all-important.”

The McGovern Institute’s mission is to study the human brain in ways that can be translated into therapies for brain disorders. That mission resonates with people in the technology sector, Jennings said.
“They understand the importance of research in addressing what is a huge and important problem,” he said. “But they also just find the technology interesting and it’s a rewarding place to invest their philanthropic support.”