Digitalis Commons

Our Executive Director, Lara Mangravite, teamed up with a group of life sciences enthusiasts to highlight new models of funding and accelerating innovation. Check it out below!

Check out Eric Gilliam's latest piece at @freaktakes, where he discusses how organizational structures must adapt in semiconductor research to accommodate evolving goals in a maturing field. As with biological systems, structure also determines function at research organizations. https://lnkd.in/etxPRzJa

Excited to see Melinda doubling down on investments to advance social progress for women through Pivotal Ventures. Pivotal is a shining example of how flexible capital - including a combination of venture investment, impact-focused funds and grant-giving - can be strategically aligned and work together to realize mission goals.

Digitalis Commons is growing! We are seeking Commercialization Leads at multiple levels of expertise to join our team. Are you excited about using your business skills to support early-stage innovation in healthcare and life sciences? If so, apply below! https://lnkd.in/eCA7b-Js

We're thrilled to introduce, Eva Martin, a physician, innovator, and passionate advocate for women's health, as our next XIR! 💡 Q: Please share a bit about your background and experience. A: I am lucky to have a career focused on meeting patients' needs through development of new ideas into life-changing innovations. I received my undergraduate degree in Social and Cognitive Neuroscience from Harvard College with a secondary field in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Prior to medical school, I worked at the University of California, San Francisco conducting breast cancer research. I received my medical degree from Harvard Medical School. After my Obstetrics and Gynecology internship training at Kaiser Permanente San Francisco, I founded a women’s health medical device company and developed a novel medical device for use in pregnancy and labor. The device received FDA clearance, a utility patent from the USPTO, and a US National Institutes of Health research grant. I joined Roche, a biopharmaceutical company, in 2018 and have held roles in clinical development, data strategy, and partnering. I am grateful for the opportunity to support product development to meet the needs of patients worldwide. Q: What excites you about working with early stage innovation? A: I can't imagine a more exciting way to spend one's career than turning new ideas into real solutions for people everywhere. The path from idea to solution is long. A new technological breakthrough or biological discovery may open the door to solving a previously unsolvable problem. However, this is only the first step in unlocking real value. It takes dedication, creativity, and perseverance to work through the uncertain months and years of development to transform new ideas. As such, it is an honor to work with early stage concepts on the development pathway that eventually makes these innovations real and accessible. Q: What is one thing you hope to achieve by the end of your career? A: Working in the healthcare field is a tremendous gift, because we are given the opportunity to positively impact millions of lives. My great hope for my career is that I can contribute to a new era in the field of women's health. Women face a great many unmet medical needs, and it will take a concerted effort from passionate individuals across disciplines, stakeholder groups, and vantage points to unite and tackle these problems. By the end of my career, I hope that we look back to this moment as the spark that ignited a new renaissance in innovation for women everywhere.

Claire Meunier, our next XIR, has dedicated her career to supporting innovators and forming creative public/private partnerships to improve outcomes for patients in devastating diseases like Parkinson's. ⚖ Q: Please share a bit about your background and experience. A: I've spent my career growing mission-driven organizations in drug development and healthcare. My experience has focused on the shortage of clinicians trained to care for the geriatric population, the need for ecosystem engagement to develop critical tools to support a cure for Parkinson's Disease, developing novel measures of health using digital signals from sensors, and founding and leading precompetitive collaborations to collate best practices across the field. Across all of my experiences, I've focused on commercial strategy and partnerships to bring together the right collaborators to develop and implement solutions that address healthcare's most intractable problems. Q: What current trends in healthcare innovation are you most excited about? A: Since I work across drug development and healthcare, I have two: FDA's acceptance of digital biomarkers to support drug approval – it's been a long time coming, but with the recent qualification of the first digital biomarker for use as an endpoint in a clinical trial, I think we could finally see immense efforts in this category deliver a flurry of follow-on qualifications. These measures integrate data that reflect continuous, lived experience of disease instead of relying solely on clinical snapshots. More qualifications of novel measures will revolutionize how we measure and assess drug efficacy. Virtual care as a model for rethinking care delivery – the pandemic forced us into providing most care virtually, and now we are settling into a new normal where the field is thinking more strategically about what can be virtual, who should be providing care along the patient journey, and how to marry virtual with brick-and-mortar. There are several promising technology capabilities being integrated here, including AI that predicts who is at risk and technology that supports follow-on actions for care teams to intervene early. Q: What is one thing you hope to achieve by the end of your career? A: Helping more of the most promising solutions win! We need solutions that: are inclusive and work for everyone; result in better outcomes at a lower cost; precisely measure what works for specific patient subgroups; predict who might be at risk, and then have the tools and incentives in place to intervene sooner once we know a trajectory of decline is likely. Impacting progress on these goals by the end of my career would be amazing.

Introducing Jahanara Ali! Jahan has championed healthcare innovation from multiple perspectives, including VC, tech transfer, and as an operator. 🔦 Q: Please share a bit about your background and experience. A: I have spent my career catalyzing the commercialization of early-stage life science and healthcare innovations. While doing this, I have been fortunate to have sat on different sides of the table. I started out in university technology commercialization, where I developed an appreciation for the university as an innovation engine. I then joined a small biotech company, where I learned how successful teams can make things happen. Subsequently, I joined an investment firm, where, in addition to making investments, I learned the power of programs to help early-stage companies overcome challenges. I also led the entrepreneurship program at a medical school, where I was able to connect the dots to help faculty and students successfully launch businesses. Q: What excites you about working with early-stage innovation? A: I love seeing the myriad of ideas that people come up with and what motivates entrepreneurs. In healthcare, it is often personal, and I love hearing people's unique stories of what inspired them to solve some of the most intractable problems. One of my favorite entrepreneurs is someone who navigated the healthcare system for his ADHD. He subsequently disrupted the mental health space by enabling online therapy (i.e., in the privacy of your home). He launched his company around 2010, way before many similar companies followed. And it was nice to see the company exit as a sale to a large insurance company. Q: What’s one piece of advice that you would give to healthcare funders or founders? A: For founders, I would say: do your homework and start early. Look at the other companies the investor has invested in, what stage they invest in, and what the company looked like when the investor invested. Also, look at other investors they have invested with and reach out to those investors. Talk to people who know them. Talk to the companies they turned down as well as the ones they invested in. Always try to reach out to investors through warm introductions if possible. And start to develop these relationships before you need money.

Women's health innovation is gaining momentum, but significant challenges remain. According to SVB's Innovation in Women's Health Report, the women's health sector received record investment in 2023 across a variety of focus areas. However, women have faced challenges in accessing quality healthcare due to sex and gender biases, as well as a lack of representation in medical research. This often leads to delayed diagnosis, misdiagnosis, or undertreatment. To resolve these systemic issues and improve outcomes, more concerted efforts are needed to fund innovation, accelerate commercialization, and ensure accessible solutions reach women everywhere. This is why we are incredibly proud of our partner, Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), for investing in this space, beginning with their Sprint for Women's Health!

Tom Cassels, a passionate advocate for innovation in healthcare! Tom has spent his career focused on improving outcomes for patients. We're delighted to have him as an XIR. 🙌 Q: Please share a bit about your background and experience. A: For 20+ years I've worked hand in hand with provider executives, health plan leaders, life sciences explorers, entrepreneurs, operators and investors to improve how patients experience healthcare and how physicians/nurses/allied clinicians experience the practice of medicine. I've done so as a health services researcher, a strategy consultant, a strategy lead at two Fortune 100 companies, a board member, and as an entrepreneur. Q: What’s one piece of advice that you would give to healthcare funders or founders? A: I always advise founders to be storytellers about the outcome for their users, not about the "coolness" of what they've built. And I advise funders to look for magnetic people who can tell stories internally as well as they do externally. That is the differentiator between finding and keeping great talent who are committed to the success of the business through ups and downs. Q: What current trends in healthcare innovation are you most excited about? A: Digital literacy is the most important force for positive change in healthcare. Innovations that go beyond whiz bang tech to engage end users in building up their own digital literacy (e.g. AI prompt engineering) will drive the deepest impact across the next decade.

Our next XIR is Susan Rosenthal! Sue has had a tremendous impact on the growth of the life sciences ecosystem in NYC. We're so grateful to have her expertise in building communities and bringing new medicines to patients. 🔬 Q: Please share a bit about your background and experience. A: I’ve had the incredible fortune to work with many scientists, entrepreneurs, market leaders, and more on bringing medicines (and companies) they’re passionate about forward, from as early as lead optimization and candidate selection in preclinical development through clinical development, launch, and lifecycle management, factoring in the various elements of technical and regulatory risk, patient needs, funding, and market dynamics. Most recently, I’ve been leading the effort to build life sciences in NYC, including programs building out infrastructure, translational R&D, companies, and talent. Q: What excites you about working with early stage innovation? A: You know it when you see it. There’s a new platform or approach that can revolutionize treatment and our understanding of wellness or disease. Or the data it’ll generate will be what revolutionizes our understanding of biology. And in that moment, while it’s being explained to you, you feel yourself hitting the edge of your chair. It occupies your mind for the next few days because you know it can help so many people. Those moments are unlike any other and while they’re not as common as I’d like, when it happens, I know I’m in the right place and I gear up to ask how I can help. Q: What is one thing you hope to achieve by the end of your career? A: I’ve had incredible outcomes in my career: developing new medicines, being part of our response to COVID, building life sciences as an industry in NYC. There’s certainly more to do to drive innovation in health, but my answer to this question is more about people than things. I have and have had many great sponsors in my career (with much gratitude). They’ve helped me develop in and across roles, consider other perspectives through new scenarios, and find myself as a leader. I hope to pay that forward whether as an advisor or a leader, wherever my career takes me.