Aaron Abend is a software entrepreneur whose company helped academic medical centers apply clinical data from Electronic Health Records to medical research. His company, Recombinant Data, was acquired in 2012.
In 2013, Mr. Abend became interested in autoimmune disease after being approached by a biotech with a new treatment for lupus. He declined that opportunity, but shortly after, his mother was diagnosed with Sjogren’s Syndrome (after living 10 years with classic symptoms). He discovered the poor state of knowledge about autoimmune diseases and decided to build a national registry modeled on the National Cancer Registry.
He founded Autoimmune Registry Inc (ARI) in 2016 as a 501(c)3 dedicated to create a hub for research, statistics, and patient data on all autoimmune diseases.
ARI operates a national database for patients who suffer from any autoimmune disease. Its mission is to reduce the time of diagnosis, support research, compute prevalence statistics, and establish autoimmune disease as a major class of disease so that it receives the awareness of the public, the attention of healthcare providers, and the appropriate funding needed to improve upon existing treatment protocols and disease management strategies.
Mr. Abend earned an BA at Middlebury College, an MBA at Columbia University, and has studied Biomedical Informatics at Stanford University.
