mark drew

Mark Drew is a product designer trained at the Rhode Island School of Design. His focus is new product development, and he has worked on orthopedic implants, hospital systems, electric aircraft and humanoid robots.

At IlluminOss Medical he co-invented a minimally invasive internal bone fixation system that uses an angioplasty balloon as the delivery system for a UV-curable polymethyl methacrylate — a new way to repair small fractures, far less invasive than titanium rods and pins. The system has been implanted in thousands of patients worldwide. The work made him a named inventor on ten US patents filed between 2009 and 2025.

At Mass General Brigham he worked with his principal investigator Dr. James Stahl on applications leveraging the hospital's real-time location system. The research team turned movement into insight, and insight into behavior change. Published results included the finding that physicians who spent less face time with patients ordered more tests, and that normative interventions like competition motivated improvement far more effectively than money. The work was published in multiple journals, including Technology and Health Care, Health Systems and the International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance.

He has also taught product design and innovation to medical students as a part-time instructor at Brown University's Warren Alpert Medical School.

At Kitty Hawk, the Google-funded electric aircraft venture, he worked on cabin design and flight safety systems — among them an ultra-lightweight aircraft seat, and a flight suit, 3D-knit from a custom ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene yarn, to protect pilots and passengers in a crash.

He also built PFAS.report, the first clinically validated direct-to-consumer PFAS blood test. Having found that an existing lab could run an eight-analyte panel nobody was offering to the public, he and a colleague built it in a week and launched it on Hacker News and Reddit, along with his own PFAS test results. It went viral. One of the main product challenges was in the interpretation: labs return raw analyte values, so the service included a calculator that turned patient results into a single exposure score, benchmarked against National Academies guidance.

His other work includes interactive characters for DuckDuckGo, enclosures for the Figure 03 humanoid robot, an in-store messaging bot for Target, an M&A marketplace for accounting firms at Rightworks, and Clinic.dev, a free private clinic for doctors with electronic prescribing and labs included.

He is currently preoccupied with agents, and with the hope they finally fix how we interface with machines (before they take over completely).

He lives in Lafayette, in the East Bay of California, with tons of coyotes and owls. His backyard is the Las Trampas Wilderness Area, which he hikes regularly.