Recap Roadshow France - INSEAD Healthcare Club Annual Conference 2022

On May 19, Tech4Eva partnered with INSEAD Healthcare Club to inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs. The event brought together INSEAD MBA students, start-ups, investors and experts to discuss how technology can help us improve healthcare and how digital innovation specifically can empower healthcare.

The Future of Digital Health

Julien de Salaberry, founder and CEO, presented his company Galen Growth, the global leader in Digital Health private market data, intelligence, and analytics.

Julien talked about the inflection point, the event that leads to a significant change in the evolution of a business and what digital health is reaching in 2022. The world of digital health has grown rapidly in recent years. He believes that it has now reached a stage where it needs to evolve and move to a different stage of growth. The future of digital health is through platforms.

Julien states: "We believe that platforms are now really the catalyst for taking digital health to the next level of maturity. The Covid pandemic has really focused attention on the importance of public health. So digital health has been firmly in the spotlight. Digital is now a key player in enabling the delivery of healthcare and has also led to a surge in corporate funding." 

Platforms are developing significant value propositions for patients, health professionals and health systems. According to Julien, digital health companies will continue to lead this dynamic because they are looking to stabilise, for maturity and will probably be the precursor of a great momentum!

Delivering Patient-Centric Care via Digital Solutions

The panelists Krystian Fikert, CEO & Founder of MyMind, Augustin de Bettignies, Chairman of MPC Therapeutics and David Stoikovitch, CEO & CO-Founder of Moona discussed the benefits of digital health in delivering care to the patient.

For example, digital applications have the ability to say "Don't forget to take this pill" at the start of your meal. It also helps mental health services to support patients to end the journey with mild mental health difficulties rather than going to moderate or even severe difficulties. To give you an idea, it would cost the hospital about 21,000 Euros to support this patient. 

This panel debated how information is transferred from the hospital and is followed up by the doctors or nurses who take care of patients. Supporting the technological development allows the support of the infrastructure, the organisation of the infrastructure as well as organizing different doctors.

In medicine,it is said that there are many reasons to fail, beyond technology. In healthcare, it is very difficult to know where a mistake would come from. In conclusion, healthcare is a very complex field for an entrepreneur, but it can help to have a real added value to be successful.

An Investor’s Perspective

Chandra Leo of HBM Partners gave us his perspective as an investor in the closing keynote. Chandra is responsible for global investments in more than 25 private biotech, therapeutics, medical device, digital health and diagnostics companies. The fund has $2.5 billion in assets under management.

He explained that the digital health investments are important for most investors and that it is crucial to understand the investment strategies of each investor when approaching them and fundraising. There are about 100 venture capitalists who together make most of the decisions about which pharmaceutical companies get funded and which do not.

Chandra specifies that the time horizon for venture capitalists can be 10 years, 5, 6 or 7 years. For instance, that is not a lot of time in drug development if you think about it, taking a drug from the early stages to approval can easily take time. A lot of capital is needed to bring a drug to market. Tufts' figures say it's $1.5 or $2 billion. You usually can't go all the way with private funds, so you either have to do an IPO or find a large pharmaceutical company to buy you out.

Chandra also highlighted a few facts about innovation in women’s health:

·       Market size – 50% of the world’s population or 3.9 billion people

·       12% of VC decision makers are women which is obviously too low and needs to change

·       Only 1-2% of total pharma R&D spending

·       Women’s health is a blind spot for many investors (perception of a niche while its not)

·       The need to break cultural and society taboos

·       A large sector with important unmet needs = huge opportunity!

To watch the full event recording, please listen to the YouTube video recording here.

Tech4Eva is a cause and we would like you to join us in changing perceptions and accelerating technologies in women’s health!