Dr. Steven St. Peter, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Vie Ventures, discusses his firm's unique hybrid model that combines venture capital with disease philanthropy to accelerate the development of new therapies for autoimmune diseases. While philanthropies have excelled at funding basic research, a gap exists in translating those findings into FDA-approved drugs. Steven points out that the autoimmune field is entering a golden age, driven by insights from immuno-oncology and by AI's potential to analyze data across autoimmune diseases.

Steven explains, "I've been doing venture capital for the last 30 years. I'm also a physician, but I'm very interested in how venture capital is helping bring new therapies to patients, and that's really the core of what venture capital does. So I've been doing that and am comfortable with that for a long time, as well as my co-founders. About five years ago, I joined an effort working with the disease philanthropy to help create a hybrid model. And I thought that was very interesting because these disease philanthropies are really the voice of the patient. So to the extent that you can bring disease, philanthropy, and venture capital to mix, I just think that's an incredible model, and that really is what Vie Ventures is all about."

"The large disease-focused philanthropies have done a phenomenal job in funding basic science research coming out of academics and helping really define, well, what is autoimmune disease and what are the biological systems and why does that matter? And in fact, just taking the case of type 1 diabetes until the 1980s, we didn't even know that that was an autoimmune disease. And in an autoimmune disease, it's the body's immune system attacking a tissue that it shouldn't. And the consequence is that it manifests as a sort of disease. So a lot of the research foundation spent a good amount of time teasing out all that basic science, and that led to insights that then allow us to create new therapies to actually change the course of these diseases. And so as you roll the clock forward to where we are in 2026, that biology has been defined."

"So what Vie Ventures does is it really allows a way for these disease foundations to reach into the translation of that fundamental discovery research to actually fund drugs that are going into patients to hopefully result in an FDA approval. And that just hasn't been done in the past because the science hadn't been defined yet, but now we're at this very exciting time, and that's the next frontier."

#VieVentures #AutoimmuneDisease #VentureCapital #CARTTherapy #Immunology #PatientAdvocacy #Biotech #HealthcareInnovation #Type1Diabetes #MultipleSclerosis #Lupus #EmpoweredPatient #HealthcarePodcast #MedicalResearch #PatientCentricity #DiseasePhilanthropy #AutoimmuneDisorders #ImmuneOncology #VentureImpact

vieventures.com

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Ed Ahn, CEO of MEDIPOST, is developing next-generation stem cell therapies for inflammation-driven degenerative diseases with a primary focus on knee osteoarthritis. Using umbilical cord-derived stem cells, which have higher proliferation capacity than adult-derived stem cells, allows MEDIPOST to scale cell manufacturing and provide broader access to care. The company's lead program, Cartistem, has been approved in Korea for over 10 years, and new funding will accelerate US clinical trials.

Ed explains, "We are focused on treating inflammation-driven degenerative diseases. So all these diseases that you commonly associate with the aging process. Those are some of the things that we're very interested in slowing the progression of."

"We're actually going back to the source for neonatal stem cells from the cord blood. One of the primary advantages of going for a neonatal source of stem cells versus an adult source is that these are the most naive stem cells that one can obtain. And what I mean by naive is that they've been in a protected environment in the mother's womb. They have not been exposed to a lot of the different antigens that adults have been exposed to. So they're very immune-privileged compared to adult stem cells."

"I think this idea or the concern about cost can be applied to all sorts of regenerative medicines, whether or not they're gene therapies or cell therapies, they're amongst the most expensive therapies to manufacture for a company, primarily because we're building a process around an inherently biological process.

One of the advantages we have at MEDIPOST is that this product has been approved in Korea for over 10 years. So we have a tremendous amount of manufacturing experience and know-how from our parent company in Korea that we're able to apply to our manufacturing process in North America. And that really advances and matures our program far beyond other people in the field."

#MEDIPOST #CARTISTEM #StemCellTherapy #KneeOsteoarthritis #RegenerativeMedicine #Innovation #Healthcare #Biotech #ClinicalTrials #JointHealth #AntiAging #MedicalBreakthrough #BiotechInnovation

medipost.com

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Yael Elish, Founder of StuffThatWorks, was part of the Waze founding team that brought crowdsourcing to maps and traffic. She is now bringing her insights into the power of the crowd to build a patient-generated real-world database to support patients and medical research, accelerating drug development, and improving the efficiency of clinical trials. Their OpenStuff platform is an AI-powered search tool that makes patient experience data accessible to patients, doctors, and researchers, and validates the patient experience.

Yael explains, "As background, I was part of the Waze founding team, and this is where I got acquainted firsthand with the power of crowdsourcing. Waze does crowdsourcing of traffic and the building of maps. And this is where people are joining based on a common vision that if everyone shares information in an organized form. If there's a platform that can collect all the data in a structured format, it can deliver everything in a way that's much more useful and solves a very big problem that otherwise couldn't be solved."

"So the idea here is people have a ton of experience, especially when we're talking about a chronic condition someone has been living with for years and years and years. They've tried many things. Some went out and researched the information that everyone else has. How they experienced the condition, what they tried, what worked, what didn't work, what are the aggravating factors, what are the comorbidities? All this information that people have, if collected in an organized form as data at scale, can be transformed into very powerful data that doesn't exist today. That's the premise behind StuffThatWorks. And the way it works is that anyone can join their condition community. So if you have a chronic condition, you will search for your condition, you will join your condition, and you will share information that becomes data, consistent data across everyone who joins the platform. And today, with AI, it's really transformative. It's amazing, unique data that doesn't exist anywhere else."

#StuffThatWorks #OpenStuff #HealthTech #PatientEmpowerment #AIHealthcare #CrowdsourcingHealth #DigitalHealth #ChronicDisease #HealthcareInnovation #PatientData #ClinicalTrials #PersonalizedMedicine #HealthAI #MedicalResearch #PatientVoice #HealthcareTransformation #RealWorldEvidence

stuffthatworks.health

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Jesse Lipson, Founder and CEO of Levitate, focuses on using AI to help providers enhance patient-provider communication and develop and maintain personal, authentic connections with patients. Patient expectations are changing due to AI, and patients now expect more responsive, personalized messaging from doctors. This service-as-software can support busy providers in developing and executing a communication strategy at scale to build their practices and strengthen relationships with patients.

Jesse explains, "My vision was to help what I call relationship-based businesses. I would consider many types of healthcare practices to fall into that category, and to do a better job of keeping in touch with their patients in a more personal, authentic way at scale. And so I think the challenge is we all know the value of the simple things like remembering kids' names, pets' names, spouse names, hobbies, and reaching out and keeping in touch in a thoughtful way on a regular basis. But it's very hard to do that at scale, and things kind of slip through the cracks."

"When it comes to patient care itself, you want to be that person who, when you do get to spend a little bit of time with a patient, you are remembering things about them more on a human level rather than just in and out on the clinical level. Both because that provides a good patient experience, and I think that's what a lot of providers are motivated to do when they get into the field. But that context can also be helpful in providing a high level of care, in knowing and remembering things, and in deepening that personal relationship. So that was our goal: not to use AI as an automated replacement for that communication between providers and patients, but to use it to help them do a better job of that personal, authentic communication."

#Levitate #PatientEmpowerment #PatientExperience #PatientCenteredCare #HealthTech #HealthcareTechnology #RelationshipMarketing #PersonalizationAtScale #AIinHealthcare #CustomerExperience #ServiceAsSoftware #HealthTech #PatientCommunication #AIinHealthcare #HealthcareInnovation #DigitalHealth #PatientEngagement #HIPAA #PatientCare

Levitate.ai

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Dr. Justin Schrager, Founder and Chief Medical Officer at Vital, aims to address poor communication in acute care settings such as hospitals and urgent care centers. Vital's software platform provides patients with real-time, understandable information on their own devices via a secure website. This AI-powered system is designed to provide updates on lab results and educational content, and to augment clinical care without adding to the workload of doctors and nurses.

Justin explains, "We make software for the hospital, urgent care, and inpatient settings. The problem is that communication suffers when you get busier. So the busier you are, the less communication happens. It's a bit of a catch-22. And it's sort of treated as an expendable action when things are really critical. I'm an ER doctor. I understand that. And so we're trying to solve that problem by essentially communicating to patients, keeping them up to date, and helping the clinical staff out when they frankly don't have a lot of time to share a lot of the kinds of information that we're able to show patients."

"Access is at such a deficit right now that the vast majority of the healthcare we provide in the hospital and the ER specifically is for patients who are wide awake, thinking clearly, have family members there with them, and they just have an urgency. Sore throat, can't swallow, broken arm, things that aren't necessarily life-threatening or even limb-threatening, but they're urgent, and they need to be dealt with in a timely fashion. And so I think that's really where our software plays best."

#Vitalio #HealthcareInnovation #PatientEngagement #AIinHealthcare #DigitalHealth #HealthTech #PatientExperience #HealthcareCommunication #MedicalAI #HospitalTechnology #PatientCare #PatientSafety

vital.io

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Dr. Charlotte McKee, Chief Medical Officer at Sionna, describes the nature of cystic fibrosis (CF, a genetic disease caused by a mutation in the single CFTR gene. While current CFTR modulator therapies do not address the most common mutation, Sionna's novel oral medicine is designed to target the previously undruggable NBDI domain of the CFTR protein. This new therapy aims to lead to better lung function and prevent the accumulation of permanent damage to other organs like the pancreas, gut, and liver.

Charlotte explains, "Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease. The gene was actually discovered in 1989 for cystic fibrosis. It's considered a rare disease, but it's a relatively large rare disease. And one of those rare diseases that is potentially fatal, as you mentioned, it's thought of as a lung disease. And most patients, if their life is shortened, it's typically because of lung disease, because the lungs can be very severely affected. But the protein is caused by a genetic mutation in a gene called CFTR, and the protein is made from that gene. The CFTR protein is present on every epithelial cell of the body."

"Sionna is focused on a novel target in the CFTR protein. So you may know that, actually, there are approved medicines that have been developed over the last couple of decades that improve the function of the CFTR protein. And they've really advanced the clinical field, and there have been tremendous advances for people with CF. But this protein, this CFTR protein that goes wrong in CF, is a big, complicated, multi-part channel."

"Another unusual thing about CF is that there's one mutation that's so common around the world, and the part of CFTR that goes most wrong with F508del. This mutation is in a part of CFTR that was previously considered undruggable. It's that part that is called NBD1, and Sionna has been working for over a decade and a half of research, actually starting with Genzyme and then continuing through the company, Sanofi, has actually figured out how to develop potential medicines against this part of the CFTR protein that goes most wrong. And so we are working on these, they're called modulators, CFTR modulators, or we are working on NBD1-focused potential medicines that can directly bind to and stabilize this specific part of the CFTR protein."

#Sionna #CysticFibrosis #NBD1Stabilizers #CFTRModulators #RareDisease #Biotechnology #MedicalInnovation #PrecisionMedicine #GeneticDisease #PulmonaryHealth

sionnatx.com

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Mark Bertagnolli, Chief Operating Officer at ViroMissile, has developed a modified vaccinia virus that can be delivered intravenously to seek out and destroy solid tumors throughout the body and is not dependent on a specific genetic driver of a cancer. The virus has been engineered to be resistant to the body's complement system, allowing it to survive in the bloodstream longer to infect the tumor. This action also turns the tumor microenvironment from cold to hot, signaling the immune system to attack the tumor and potentially working in combination with other treatments like PD-1 inhibitors to make them more effective.

Mark explains, "ViroMissile has a modified vaccinia virus, and viruses tend to like to infect tumor cells. So the trick has been how to harness this. And we're on our third generation of virus, and we have a virus that you can inject intravenously that searches for tumors throughout the body, infects them, the body clears the rest of the virus, and the virus embeds itself in the tumors, replicates, spreads, activates the immune system, and destroys the tumors."

"So, the vaccinia virus itself, nobody knows really where it came from, but it ended up being the foundation of the smallpox vaccine, and we get the word vaccine from the vaccinia virus. Our founder was the first to sequence the genome of the vaccinia virus over 30 years ago. For the last 20 years, he's been working on it as an oncolytic agent. And in this particular case, within vaccinia, there are different strains. And he was able to isolate a very specific, never before isolated strain of virus that is resistant to complement attack, and also replicates very quickly in infected cells. So it has two embedded features within it, naturally, that we're able to capitalize on."

#ViroMissile #CancerResearch #Immunotherapy #OncolyticVirus #Biotechnology #MedicalInnovation #CancerTreatment #PrecisionMedicine #HealthcareInnovation #CancerCare #VacciniaVirus

viromissile.com

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Dr. Ronald Lane, Founder of HOPE-Neuron Therapeutx, is developing an approach to treating ALS by rebalancing the body's immune system, which becomes dysfunctional in neurodegenerative diseases. The mechanism involves treating a patient's blood outside the body to activate the immune system and then infusing it back into the patient. The theory is that traditional drugs often fail because they target static genetic mutations and symptoms, while the source of the disease lies in the ongoing immune imbalance.

Ronald explains, "Well, in a broad sense, the goal of HOPE Neuron is based on the fact that our challenge here is to bring hope. And we use a neuronal basis to do that. We're not about drugs. There are no chemicals involved. We don't go that direction. But basically, it cuts across. We deal with memory, we deal with dementia and Alzheimer's, but our target initially is ALS."

"As I mentioned a moment ago, we're not doing drugs, we're not using chemicals. So what are you doing? Well, we're using the cell's immune system, and the problem with disease is that the immune system gets out of balance. When it's out of balance, you become ill. It can be in many different diseases. And there are certain indicators, and we know what to look for and what compounds the body generates."

#HOPENeuron #ALS #Neurology #ImmuneTherapy #MedicalInnovation #ALSResearch #Biotechnology #NeurodegenerativeDisease #MedicalBreakthrough #ClinicalTrials #Healthcare #Innovation #Neurodegeneration #Neuroplasticity #MedicalDevices #Immunotherapy #NeuroscienceInnovation #FutureOfMedicine #NonPharmaTherapies

hopeneuron.com

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