Although Wave Therapeutics’ work combines many of Jessica Bussert’s interests, a chance encounter in adult life provided the spark she needed to start her business.
From growing up with an interest in technology to moving into the business and healthcare spheres, Jessica has had a long road—often dealing with rampant transphobia since her transition in the mid-2000’s. But now, she’s running a company aimed at improving the lives of wheelchair users by creating an ideal and affordable chair cushion.
Jessica had always been interested in the tech world. She taught herself about electronics when she was 10, how to code when she was 12, and by 15 had her own door-to-door IP consulting business.
“This was the very beginning of the personal computer age, and nobody knew how to use this thing,” she said. “And I did.”
Once she got to college, she turned it into a C Corporation to help support her young family. After running that business for years, she then led a Fortune 100 company’s European business consulting and professional services
Part of the reason Jessica wanted to sell her own company and work for someone else, she said, was due to England’s passage of some of the first anti-bigotry laws that included transgender people.
“I knew I wanted to transition, but I was afraid to do so in the States and I thought moving to Europe, I’d finally be in a safer environment,” she said. “Well, unfortunately, that didn’t happen.”
When Jessica transitioned about 20 years ago, she lost her job and her career—nobody would hire her. At the same time, a trans discrimination lawsuit she filed was gaining large amounts of publicity, taking away her option for a quiet life. She said paparazzi and news media followed her around and outed her to the world, derailing everything she’d worked for up to that point.
A little while later, Jessica said she and her family received notice from the British government they had 28 days to leave due to the loss of her work permit. They moved back home to the States and to a little log cabin in southern Indiana they had bought years before. Although Jessica and her family only intended to live there a few weeks, she could not obtain employment.
Jessica sank into a deep depression after two years of job searching. However, she began to take note of her surroundings in her small town—no hospital, mostly volunteer emergency services and two ambulances for the whole county. She began volunteering with the fire department and gained a strong sense of purpose, which inspired her to go back to school and become first an EMT, and later an ER nurse.
After dealing with further transgender discrimination in the nursing field, Jessica found work at a small hospital, which she later left to pursue travel nursing.
On one of her travel gigs, she met a bilateral amputee veteran who was using a cheaply-made wheelchair. He came in with some of the worst bed sores she had ever seen and was septic due to infections and wounds. Once he was stabilized, Jessica learned how his doctor had prescribed a $4,000 wheelchair cushion which he couldn’t afford. His story moved her, and soon enough she was tinkering with potential ideas.
“That night I asked myself, ‘You know, I’ve got all these years and years of engineering experience, and I’ve got this healthcare knowledge,’” she said. “‘Could I design a better solution that can be manufactured and sold affordably?’”
In 2019, Jessica officially incorporated Wave Therapeutics and started working on creating the ideal wheelchair cushion nearly full time. She only took one other nursing contract after that—to work at a New York City hospital during the peak of COVID-19.
There are two full-time people in the company, Jessica and her spouse and cofounder, Sharon Bussert, along with a handful of part-time workers.
Sharon met Jessica in a chance encounter when a northern Indiana snowstorm forced recent college graduate Sharon to take the bus one day, and Jessica, who was still in college at the time, was waiting for it at the same stop. The pair were friends for a while according to Sharon, and then began dating.
Wave Therapeutics isn’t the first business they’ve run together. Sharon said she had a skillset Jessica needed—more experience working behind the scenes on technical and financial aspects—which made them a great match for working together.
With chair cushions on the market running up high costs, one of Wave Therapeutics’ main focuses is making sure an affordable product is available to everyone, not just for those who already have major injuries and can more easily get costs covered by insurance.
“I believe that if we can get this project launched and into market, it will change the standard of care for pressure injury prevention,” Sharon said.
As of now, they’ve done over 500 customer discovery interviews and created 10 generations of prototypes. In their early tests, Jessica said Wave Therapeutics’s cushion delivers almost two times as much oxygen to affected cells as the current market-leading product.
The cushion is not on the market yet, with fundraising being the biggest limiting factor. They now are dealing with outside investors, with some even telling Jessica they are “not going to get involved in that culture war,” and stepping away. To date, she said the company has raised around $1.1 million in investment dollars and about $300,000 in grants and awards.
Beyond this first product, Jessica has big dreams for what Wave Therapeutics can accomplish in the future. They’re looking into creating hospital beds, products for surgical suites and even items for a mass consumer market, such as comfort devices for long haul truckers or anyone sitting for long periods of time.
Jessica and her family moved to Chicago’s West Loop area about a year-and-a-half ago. Since coming to the city, they’ve been able to find more resources for LGBTQ+ business owners and trans folks in general.
As one of few trans women in business leadership positions, Jessica said she’d like to see more opportunities with adequate support for trans folks to realize their own dreams.
“The far majority of us are either unemployed or underemployed,” she said. “I’ve got friends that have doctorates that are flipping burgers just to pay bills. It’s such an incredible waste of resources.”
This story is part of the Digital Equity Local Voices Fellowship lab through News is Out. The lab initiative is made possible with support from Comcast NBCUniversal.