Alex Yang is emerging as an unusually young figure in the world of health-technology, best known for founding Reteena, a startup tackling one of medicine’s hardest problems: how to make Alzheimer’s diagnosis and therapy more accessible. The story’s appeal lies not only in its mission, but in its method.
Yang, an 18-year-old schoolboy in Seoul, runs a global company on a punishing routine that starts before dawn to align with teammates in the United States, before heading off to class.
He describes Reteena as born of ambition but no connections. His recruitment strategy was simple: post research proposals and code in online communities — Discord servers, forums and GitHub — until collaborators responded. That original cluster grew into a team and a company. The name, a play on “retina,” is meant to signal a “new vision” for Alzheimer’s diagnostics.
The story has gained traction outside South Korea too. Indian news coverage has echoed the same core arc: a teenager leading a distributed team while still living a student’s life, focused on using AI and medical imaging to detect Alzheimer’s early.
The technical edge lies in Reteena’s approach to diagnosis. MRI scans are costly and not always available — especially in under-resourced regions. Yang says the team worked on enhancing low-field MRI using machine learning, with the aim of making cheaper, portable machines more clinically useful.
The work yielded results: the company announced that a paper titled Low Field MRI Deep Learning Framework for Non-Hospitalising Early Detection and Characterisation of Alzheimer’s Disease Pathology was accepted at IEEE BigData 2024, with Yang listed as a co-author.
Yet Reteena is not simply a research outfit. It has launched a consumer-facing product called Remembrance, which Yang describes as an AI therapeutic tool that uses prompts to help patients recall memories — modelled on reminiscence therapy.
Public posts by Reteena portray Remembrance as a kind of digital memory bank powered by a large language model and a knowledge graph, offering both therapeutic and archival value.
Still, the company faces the constraints common to all health-technology ventures. In his account, Yang writes that when the team attempted to partner with a hospital, they were quickly blocked by compliance rules and ethics requirements — a reminder that even promising technology must pass real-world tests.
According to its public profile, Reteena was founded in 2024 as a non-profit focused on “AI for Alzheimer’s therapy and diagnosis,” with two core areas: low-field MRI enhancement and memory preservation using AI. Third-party listings name Yang as co-founder and chief executive, adding a small layer of corroboration.
That the story is spreading is no accident. It combines a weighty mission — making Alzheimer’s care more affordable — with an unusual backstory: a global team assembled online by a teenager.
Add in early signals of credibility — a published paper, a public-facing product — and a transparent development trail shared online, and the result is a project still early in its life, but with tangible progress and the right kind of hurdles. Reteena, in short, is not yet a breakthrough, but it is already more than a bright idea.
