The next time quiet slumber is broken by snoring and snorting—think of Philip Westbrook. He's trying to help.
Westbrook, honored last year with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Sleep Foundation, works on obstructive sleep apnea. In apnea, a sleeper's breathing stops momentarily, sometimes hundreds of times a night. The disorder can contribute to hypertension, stroke, cardiac arrest, depression or fatigue. "I devoted myself to developing a less expensive method of treatment," Westbrook says, and he has helped bring to market two devices that do just that.
Westbrook was a reluctant applicant to medical school, applying mainly because his father urged it. But he soon grew intrigued with sleep research. On staff at the Mayo Clinic, he asked that any patient with apnea symptoms be put on a gurney outside his office. Westbrook would hook up the patients to equipment and monitor their brain activity and breathing as they slept. Westbrook helped open a sleep research center at the Mayo Clinic, then another at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
But the cost and inconvenience of apnea diagnosis began to nag at him. Patients would have to come in overnight and sleep while connected to monitoring devices and observed by technicians. "Much of what I was doing—bringing people into a lab to find out if they were breathing—was a waste of time," Westbrook says. With medical technologist Daniel Levendowski, Westbrook in 2000 designed a device that collects the needed brain-activity data with a headband the patient can wear while asleep at home. "Phil said, 'It has to be easy. It has to be foolproof,'" says Levendowski, president of Advanced Brain Monitoring in Carlsbad, Calif. The company received a grant from the National Institutes of Health to make the recording device, called ARES for Apnea Risk Evaluation System.
Westbrook also sought alternatives to the bulky air-pressure pump and mask that is the main treatment for sleep apnea. Rajiv Doshi, '94, MS '98, MD '01, invented a disposable valve (taped onto the nostrils) that works to keep the airway open. Westbrook saw the value of this "before any other sleep doctors on Earth," Doshi says, and Westbrook signed on as chief medical officer of Doshi's Belmont, Calif.-based company, Ventus Medical. Because no electricity is needed for the firm's Provent therapy, it offers a treatment option for developing countries. "He shares my vision," says Doshi.
Westbrook splits his time between a lakefront cabin in Minnesota and a home in Fallbrook, Calif. His wife, Carol, was the first executive director of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Between fishing and remodeling projects, Westbrook relishes how the medical career he entered half-heartedly has morphed into a life as educator and entrepreneur. "How lucky can you be?" he asks. "I just sort of wandered around and fell into the right hole."
WENDY JALONEN FAWTHROP, ’78, is a senior copy editor at the Orange County Register.
