What reconstruction after a lumpectomy asks of a woman today, and the initiative built so that she knows she will have better options.
A woman in her mid-forties, her breast cancer caught early, is being treated at one of the best hospitals in the country. Reconstruction is on the table. The surgical plan is good and the team is skilled. The operation runs for over 11 hours, when it would normally take six. Then the moment comes, and the capillary vessels are too delicate to be connected. The surgeon makes the right call, patient safety first, and closes. No reconstruction is done, and the patient is left with a major abdominal scar as well.
This is the example Ana Catarina Silva gives when she’s asked why a woman can come out of breast cancer surgery without reconstruction. “That is not simply a complication,” she says. “That is what happens when the available options are complex, demanding, and dependent on conditions that cannot always be guaranteed.” Reconstruction, in her words, “is not a standardized procedure, and it is not accessible to all women, for reasons of geography, surgical expertise, timing, anatomy, or available hospital resources. That is the whole answer, and everything else is detail.”
Ana Catarina is the co-founder and COO of Akira Science, a Swedish MedTech company developing a bioresorbable material for breast reconstruction after cancer surgery. She is also one of the people behind Beyond the Scar, a community and awareness initiative for women who have had a lumpectomy or may face one, created in collaboration with Patricia Ripoll Ros of Fundación VISIBLE and the photographer Becky Yee. Of the woman in her example she says: “What she needed was a simpler, more accessible alternative. It did not exist. That is the gap Beyond the Scar exists to make visible, and the gap Akira Science is building a solution to address.”
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Someone Who Looks Like Her
Beyond the Scar exists, Ana Catarina says, “to close the information gap.” The reader she has in mind first is specific: “A woman or a man who just heard ‘lumpectomy’ for the first time, who is processing a diagnosis and making decisions in a very short window, who has no idea that reconstruction is possible, or that she or he even has options.”
Her argument is that the need has stayed out of sight. “One of the reasons reconstruction remains uncategorized as a serious issue is that the demand is invisible,” she says. “Women do not know they can ask for more, or that they should. Clinicians are asking for better solutions, but innovators need the funding to develop them.”
What Beyond the Scar puts in front of that woman isn’t medical illustration. “We are not showing clinical diagrams,” Ana Catarina says. “We are showing real women, real bodies, real stories, in their own words and their own images.” Becky Yee’s photography, she says, is central to what makes it different. A woman who finds it sees “someone who looks like her. Not a before-and-after from a surgical brochure. A person, with a name, who went through what she is going through, and is willing to say what she wished she had known.”
“What she feels, I hope, is seen. And informed. The two rarely come together in medical communication.”
Ana Catarina Silva, PhD, Co-Founder & COO, Akira Science
Ana Catarina came to the idea that visibility has to come first as a product developer.
What the Bench Does Not Teach
Ana Catarina trained as a chemist. She studied chemistry at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (FCUL) and holds a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Milano-Bicocca and FCUL. Of her working life she says: “I spent almost two decades in diagnostics research, product development, verification & validation, compliance. You learn to build things that work. What you do not learn is whether anyone is waiting for them.”
The lesson she draws from those years is blunt. “The science is rarely the problem,” she says. “The system is the problem.” The market may not be ready. The clinician may not know the solution exists. The patient may not know there are options. A product, she says, “can be technically perfect and still go nowhere, because the need was never made visible.”
“Before I bring a solution to market, I invest in making the problem undeniable. Advocacy is not a communications strategy, it is a market creation strategy.”
Ana Catarina, Co-Founder & COO, Akira Science
By the time a product arrives, she argues, the patient should already know to expect it and the clinician should already feel the pressure to offer it. Beyond the Scar, in her description, “is partly that. It is not just awareness. It is the groundwork.” That, she says, is the lesson she took from those years: first you create awareness of the problem, and then you sell the product. One of the products she worked on taught it to her, because it never reached the market at all.
A Product That Was Never Released
During Covid, Ana Catarina was working at another MedTech company when the team decided to pivot its product. “It seemed like the right call at the time,” she says. “But it meant starting from scratch, and it cost us time we did not have and created real frustration across the team.”
The hardest part, she says, wasn’t the development. “It was keeping people aligned when the ground had shifted so much. Clear, honest communication was the only thing that worked, not managing the message, just telling the team exactly where we were and why.” She doesn’t soften the ending. “In the end, we did not make it. That product was never released, but the team really did their best! It was amazing the way we stuck together.”
Colleagues, she says, would all name the same habit of hers: “the daily catch-up. I am the person who wants the team together every morning, and who will send a follow-up with the action points before anyone has had a second coffee.”
She credits one mentor, Björn Ekberg, who has worked with her across three companies, with something other than advice. “What he gave me was not advice. It was confidence,” she says. “A quiet, consistent belief in what I could achieve.” He walked her through “the most complex regulatory challenges of my career with a smile and a sense of humor that made the impossible feel manageable,” and taught her a line she says she has applied in more confrontational situations than she can count: “don’t poke the bear in the room.” Beyond the Scar began with a different kind of encounter.
It Started With a Photograph
“Some collaborations start with a meeting,” Ana Catarina wrote in a LinkedIn post. “This one started with a photograph.” She had found Becky Yee’s work, she wrote, “through a group of women who share things that move them. Her images stopped me. The way she makes visible what people are expected to hide.”
Patricia Ripoll Ros, president and founder of the nonprofit Fundación VISIBLE, “came shortly after,” through Ana Catarina’s Akira Science co-founder Álvaro Morales López. Ana Catarina has written that the foundation “turns invisible patient experiences into evidence that healthcare cannot ignore.” Her account of what followed is one sentence: “Together we created Beyond the Scar.”
In September the partners held a private pre-launch gathering in New York, and the website went live alongside it. “We brought women, men, advocates, and artists into the same room,” Ana Catarina says. “That combination was intentional. The science and the human experience have been kept too far apart for too long.” Her own share of the science is being built in Stockholm.
What Akira Science Is Building
Akira Science has its roots in research at KTH, where the technology was developed by an academic team. Álvaro Morales López was involved from the very beginning, first as a student, and later took the lead in bringing the technology out of the lab and into the world. Ana Catarina and Veluska Arias Bruce joined the company this year as co-founders. She describes it as “a Swedish MedTech company developing a tunable bioresorbable biomaterial that supports soft tissue repair and dissolves on a controlled timeline, with its lead application in breast reconstruction after cancer surgery.”
That application is AkiMed™, a bioresorbable, 3D-printed breast scaffold. It is designed to be placed during the lumpectomy, to guide natural tissue regrowth and to degrade safely over time. The scaffold has been developed over six years and has preclinical data in cells and in rats. As she puts it on her profile: “No second surgery. No permanent implant. Just restoration.” The company has secured patents in the EU, the UK and the US, and Ana Catarina has written that it is going to market in the US first. What she says she could not have learned at the bench is urgency.
“In research, a five-year timeline feels responsible. When you are sitting with women and hearing their stories, you understand that five years is not a timeline. It is a cost that real people are paying while you wait.”
Ana Catarina, Co-Founder & COO, Akira Science
The initiative is younger than the scaffold, and by her own account it is at an early stage.
Where Ana Catarina Is Now
“Very early,” Ana Catarina says, asked where Beyond the Scar stands. The website launched alongside the New York event. “The community is forming, and the response from the women and the surgeons who participated was super positive,” she says. First conversations have happened, two ambassadors have signed, and the initiative is in discussion with a few partners. The platform, she says, is in development.
She knows who she wants to hear from. The women it is meant to reach come first. After them, “investors. People who understand that breast cancer reconstruction is an underfunded, underserved space, and that the solutions available today are not good enough.” And ambassadors: “women who have lived this, who carry the voice and the credibility that no founder or scientist can manufacture.” The initiative lives at beyondthescar.org.
“The recognition matters less than the reach,” she says. “What I want is for someone to read this and share it with a woman, and even a man, who needs it, or pick up the phone and say ‘we want to work with you.’”
Alongside Akira Science, Ana Catarina is a Board Member at Cell2Bio, Vice President of SPOT Nordic, a nonprofit organization of Portuguese graduate professionals, researchers and university students in the Nordic countries, and an External Expert with the EU Innovation Council. “Outside work, I am a mother of 2, a connector of people, and a volunteer in accelerator program and entrepreneur communities,” she says. “I love creating spaces where people feel supported, learn from each other, and grow.”
Asked for one entry outside work under her name, she gave a place. “Sicily. Every time, I leave something there. And every time, I go back to find it. It is not where I am from. It is not where I live. But it is the place that feels most like me.”
What’s next, in her words: “I want to bring to market a medical device that makes breast reconstruction simpler, more accessible, and more human for women after breast cancer surgery.” And the sentence she wants to be remembered by: “I am someone who decided that ‘you can have reconstruction, but you will pay in flesh’ is not good enough.”
Five Lines from Ana Catarina’s Diary
- “Breast cancer surgery ends. What it leaves behind does not.”
- “Healthcare should not stop at treatment. It should care for what comes after.”
- “That trust cannot be built after launch. It has to be there first.”
- “Energy is contagious, and I would rather over-communicate than let things slip quietly sideways.”
- “Some people build organizations. Others build platforms for the voices that never make it into the room.”
From the Diary of Ana Catarina Silva, PhD
Ana Catarina Silva, PhD, is a Stockholm-based MedTech founder and the Co-Founder & COO of Akira Science.
| Role | Co-Founder & COO, Akira Science |
| Based in | Stockholm, Sweden |
| Previously | Almost two decades in diagnostics research, product development, verification and validation, quality and compliance |
| Also | Board Member at Cell2Bio, Vice President of SPOT Nordic, External Expert with the EU Innovation Council |
“I am someone who decided that ‘you can have reconstruction, but you will pay in flesh’ is not good enough.”
Editor’s Note
Executives Diary features Ana Catarina Silva because she is doing two things at once and is plain about how they connect: developing a medical device, and helping build the public conversation that device will need before it exists. What convinces the editors is how she describes the state of both. Beyond the Scar is “very early,” and she says so. The scaffold is further along, with six years of development and preclinical data behind it, and she is as exact about that. Her account of advocacy as groundwork for a product is one that people building in other fields can use.
Executives Diary, Editorial
