Investors and healthcare startups take center stage of the year INVEST Conference March 28-30, 2022 in ChicagoIn the run-up to the conference, we are conducting a series of interviews with investors about their attitudes towards startups across four tracks, INVEST Pitch Perfect: Pharma Technology; Diagnostics; Care Coordination and Value-Based Care; and Remote Patients Monitoring and smart devices.
Finalists for each track will be reviewed by judges who will also ask questions about the startup’s business. The prize for the winner of each track is a profile in MedCity News.
The deadline for Pitch Perfect submissions is January 31st. To apply, click here.
To review the agenda, click here. You can register for the conference here.
Blake Wu of NEA
Blake Wu, a partner at a venture capital firm National Energy Board, is a judge on the PharmaTech track of the Pitch Perfect competition. At NEA, he focused on investments in healthcare services, health IT and biopharmaceuticals.
Which companies/technologies have impressed you in recent years and why?
The past two years have been about Covid-19 and its impact on our healthcare system operating in the midst of a pandemic. While we’re not necessarily out of the woods yet, we at NEA have been very concerned about the post-pandemic environment and what lasting/structural changes our learnings over the past few years will bring to our systems.
For example, we’ve been closely watching the pace of innovation in the pharma tech industry, largely because trials have become more complex and fragmented — trends that have accelerated significantly during the pandemic. When we do in-depth research on our own portfolio and a handful of key opinion leaders, we keep hearing from our stakeholders that clinical operations (clinical operations) is a major pain point, especially on the supply chain side.That’s why we’re so excited to lead slope.ioSeries A late last year. In our industry in-depth research, we are constantly faced with issues specific to specific stakeholders (e.g. clinical sites are having difficulty with inventory management, sponsors and laboratories are having difficulty with chain of custody issues, etc.). Slope is addressing this problem by building a diverse software platform that helps scale and automate complex pharmaceutical supply chains in the context of clinical research. The technology itself is impressive and ultimately the mission behind the company – to accelerate clinical research in an increasingly complex logistical environment that is critical to our industry and the entire healthcare system.
Additionally, we’ve seen an acceleration in the unbundling of healthcare during the pandemic. Specifically, digital health is being broken down into specific categories for indications and therapeutic areas, and companies are becoming more specialized in how they define their respective patient populations and market opportunities. As our system migrates to a pay-for-value structure, this unbundling of care outside the four walls of the hospital can improve incentive alignment among patients, providers, and payers.We’ve invested heavily in the trend of specialty verticals migrating from outside the hospital walls, whether it’s radiology partners In radiology, Wally Health In musculoskeletal, breathing health in Pulmonary and Cardiology, or strive to be healthy in kidney care. Each of these specialties has cost hundreds of billions of dollars, which shows the enormous size of the market opportunity.
What emerging trends do you see in how VCs invest and how much they allocate?
From a healthcare standpoint, interest in this category has certainly never been stronger. Venture funding in healthcare more than doubled from 2020, which itself was already a record year. We are already seeing unprecedented interest from late-stage private digital health companies, many of which are focused on next-generation care delivery models, or have some component of risk-taking or risk-sharing embedded in their models. In terms of how VCs are investing, 2021 has seen a slew of larger growth rounds than we’ve ever seen, with many new entrants into the healthcare VC and growth market over the past few years. Interestingly, we’ve seen continued divergence between late-stage private and public markets as they relate to digital health companies, many of which have struggled to keep investors warm after going public. At NEA, we are long-term, fundamentally driven investors. Given our size, we can and do support our company through any near-term market volatility (whether private or public). I think VCs with similar long-term thinking will succeed in this dynamic market environment.
Which regulatory or legislative changes do you think will have the greatest impact on companies in one or more of these industries?
We believe that one of the most important pieces of legislation affecting our portfolio is twenty onestone century cureSince implementation, we have seen the agency and other stakeholders across the pharmaceutical industry truly drive the development of accelerated life-saving therapies and bring new innovations to populations with unmet medical needs. Real-world evidence is a good example – by our calculations, more than three-quarters of regulatory submissions in 2020 included real-world evidence research in their submission packages. This is an unprecedented number and we expect significant growth over the next decade. We have been fortunate enough to witness this growth firsthand in our portfolio companies, love to move, and the industry is well-positioned to continue its momentum in a post-pandemic world.
Photo: phive2015, Getty Images
