Jeffrey Brewer

Jeffrey Brewer is an American businessman and diabetes advocate. He was a co-founder of Citysearch and Overture Services, and is a past president of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

Education

Brewer earned a degree in Economics from Southern Methodist University.^[1]

Citysearch

Brewer co-founded Citysearch in 1995,^[2] serving as the company’s VP of technology.^[3] He also worked in the positions of chief technology officer, and vice president of development. The company created the Internet’s first online city guides, including address information, reviews, and venue recommendations.^[1]

Overture Services

Upon its founding Brewer was the executive chairman of GoTo.com,^[4][5] later known as Overture Services and eventually sold to Yahoo! Through his company, he was the first individual to present a proof of concept for pay-per-click advertising, in February 1998 at the TED8 conference.^[6] By mid-1999 they had eight thousand clients, with $10 million in revenue.^[7] That year the company went public on the NASDAQ exchange, with Brewer as CEO.^[8] In 2001 Brewer left active management in Overture to take a year-long trip through Australia with his family.^[9]

Robotic pancreas development

After his son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 2002,^[9] Brewer began to advocate for the creation of new software-driven equipment, capable of monitoring glucose levels at a constant rate in children.^[2] He decided to help in the development of a robotic pancreas.^[10] Brewer worked on developing a connection between this pump and an external glucose monitoring system that could be connected to the pump wirelessly. The first successful tests occurred in 2009 by researchers at Yale University,^[9] research that Brewer is pushing for FDA approval.^[11] He has also co-authored an article for the peer-reviewed journal “Diabetes”.^[12] In 2014, Brewer cofounded Bigfoot Biomedical with Bryan Mazlish and Lane Desborough to market and distribute the artificial pancreases he had helped to develop.^[13][14] Bigfoot Biomedical accelerated its push to bring a closed loop robotic pancreas to the marketplace by acquiring the assets of Asante Solutions, maker of the FDA approved SNAP insulin pump, in May 2015.^[15]

Boards

In 2011 Brewer was named the president of JDRF International (formerly the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation), a role in which he has served as a spokesperson for the company and commented on research and regulatory developments regarding the juvenile diabetes.^[16] From 2003 to 2010 he also served as the chairman of KickStart, a non-profit focusing on poverty-stricken countries in East-Africa.^[17]

References