Kristina Saffran was sent to a rehabilitation facility to fight her eating disorder. After a relapse, she went back. Then she went back twice more, for a total of seven months, over her freshman year of high school.

Anorexia “almost killed me,” she recalls.

Saffran recovered using a treatment plan called family-based therapy — and went on to start a company based on the same approach. That company, Equip, recently was named the most valuable female-founded company in San Diego, valued at nearly $900 million, by Pitchbook, a leading financial data platform.

Equip is a fully virtual eating disorder treatment program that connects patients and families with a multidisciplinary care team — therapist, dietitian, medical provider, and peer and family mentors — using family-based therapy.

Saffran had dealt with anorexia since she was 10. She describes a constant “fight with her brain” around any interaction with food — not just at meals, but in any situation where food might be present, or when deciding whether and how long to exercise.

Instead of being sent to a facility for a fifth time — repeat institutionalization is the most common option, despite research showing it isn’t always the most effective — Saffran’s family stepped in. For months, her parents plated every meal and oversaw everything she ate.

“As a very precocious and independent 15-year-old, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s horrifying,’” she said. “But in hindsight, I never would have gotten better without it.”

In 2019, she co-founded Equip with Dr. Erin Parks, who is now the company’s chief clinical officer.

Upon enrollment, each patient receives a virtual care team for the family-based therapy. Treatment is woven into daily life, allowing patients to build healthier habits while maintaining a sense of normalcy so that routines can continue long after care ends.

“We want people to be in school, with their friends, building up reasons to drown out the eating disorder, as opposed to being in a facility and being pulled out of all of that,” she said.

Research supports the approach. A study reviewed by the National Institutes of Health shows that a majority of anorexia patients (61.5%) had achieved full weight restoration using this therapy method.

For almost half of the cases, there was no need for further treatment at the end of family-based therapy. Patients who did need additional treatment, the study says, presented extraneous mental disorders that required other psychiatric treatment.

Monthly treatment costs range from $2,500 to $4,000, though 97% of all major commercial insurance plans are accepted, the company says.

To date, Equip has treated more than 15,000 patients and families.

That scale also makes Equip a significant research operation. Eating disorders aren’t one-size-fits-all. Bulimia nervosa, anorexia and binge eating disorder can each be a symptom of or worsened by anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder or other mental health conditions.

Saffran acknowledges that while Family-Based-Therapy has strong research behind it, other approaches may work better for different patients. The problem, historically, has been a lack of data to study those nuances.

Equip says it now holds the largest and most diverse dataset on people with eating disorders. “We’ve really proven that we can get outcomes that are on par with the leading academic institutions in the country,” Saffran said.

Saffran said Equip can study emerging treatments and trends, including GLP-1 medications.

“We’ve heard strong anecdotes about a quieting of food noise. So we’re paying a lot of attention,” she said. “We’re always eyes wide open about what the research says.”

The company is focused on growth. “We’re well funded to keep growing and expanding,” Saffran said. “There are 5 million people who need help right now for eating disorders. We still have a long way to go to reach our goal.”