Healthcare Ventures (15.367)

About the Class

Faculty

Healthcare Ventures explores the process of early-stage healthcare venture creation and models the process of entrepreneurship, amid navigating healthcare’s complexities. The course is an opportunity for those who seek careers at the intersection of healthcare innovation, medical technology startups, global health and healthcare venture capital. This course lends a taste of the process needed to discover, evaluate, and test new technologies and business models with broad potential to impact human health. Course content and process have taken principles from MIT Hacking Medicine, Product-Market Fit, Human-Centered Design Thinking, Agile Sprints, Business Model Canvas and tailored them to the complexities and tectonic shifts of healthcare, both in the US and globally. An emphasis will be placed on understanding the Business Models and Economic Buyers for your healthcare innovation while developing a plan to design and launch a product or service. Outside Speakers Over half of the classes will include outside speakers from startups, venture capital, healthcare systems, government, pharma and med tech. Past years speakers included Google Ventures, PillPack/Amazon, Sequoia Capital, MIT Engine Fund, Blue Cross, Bain Capital, IDEO, Aetna, Fidelity, True Ventures, Verily/GoogleX, GE Ventures, Langer Lab, HHS, Atrius Health ACO. Your Project/Venture/Problem Idea If you have already conceptualized or done preliminary work around a potential solution for a pain point in healthcare, the Healthcare Ventures faculty invites you to share it with us for consideration as one of the class projects. We need ideas that are still in a sufficiently early, formative stage so they can be developed during the class and thus provide a foundation on which the key concepts of new medical venture development can be taught. These concepts include, but are not limited to, de>ining your market, understanding your customers, identifying and evaluating various stakeholders, analyzing the competition, and defining a value proposition and product/market fit. The objective of the class is to help you to understand and engage in the process of evaluating and developing a business opportunity. The class is not intended to create a viable business opportunity at the end of the semester. So, an idea would not be acceptable if it is too far along to benefit from the disciplined approach to entrepreneurship that we teach in class. If you don’t have an idea, that’s OK too; you will be able to choose a team/project that interests you. In past years, members of the class have advanced many interesting, impactful problems, and some have actually served as the foundation for building successful businesses. Please contact our TA to arrange an appointment with one of the faculty members so that we understand your idea in sufficient detail to ensure it meets the criteria outlined above, and to make sure you get the most out of taking the class. We look forward to speaking with you! Themes for Healthcare Ventures Some teams will form around ideas proposed by your classmates. Other teams will want to consider areas that are emerging trends ripe for disruption in healthcare. Theme that represent areas of significant opportunity include: Administrative automation and digitization (e.g., Cedar, Olive) Disease management and therapeutics (e.g., Omada, Hinge Health) Screening and diagnostics (e.g., Arterys, Modern Fertility) Drug discovery (e.g., Atomwise, insitro) Clinical trials (e.g., DNAnexus, Science 37) Clinical intelligence and enablement (Unite Us, BrightInsight) Primary and urgent care (e.g., Carbon Health, Cityblock) Specialty care (e.g., Somatus, Cricket Health) Pharma supply chain (e.g., Capsule, Truepill) Health plans and benefit management (e.g., Carrot, Lyra) Real world evidence (e.g., Tempus, Medbanks) Virtual care delivery (e.g., hims & hers, Doctor on Demand) Women’s health (e.g., Maven, Elvie, Tia) Health & fitness (e.g., Fitbit, Withings) Genomics (e.g., 23andMe) Healthcare/DAO/Fintech Remote monitoring (e.g., vitalconnect, eCaring) Web3/Crypto (It’s ok if you don’t know yet or don’t have a strong preference!) Action Learning Lab for Healthcare Ventures Most of the longer Thursday classes will have 4 parts: faculty lectures, outside guest speakers, and small team breakout sessions. After teams are formed in the early classes, you will begin by exploring, defining, and deepening your understanding of the unmet need and of the value of transforming the outcome. In the second block, you will consider and test potential value propositions, and finally, in the third block, you will craft a business model and pitch. Teams will witness the development, challenges, and progress of the other teams attacking different areas of healthcare in the course at regular intervals. By the end of the course, students will have experienced best practices in identifying and validating health venture opportunities, amid the challenges of navigating the healthcare/disease mapping, team dynamics, and venture capital pitching process.

Martha Gray

Dr. Gray has a multifaceted career in which she has built programs to drive biomedical technology innovation, conducted research to better understand and prevent osteoarthritis, led a preeminent academic unit, and served the profession through work with organizations and institutions. Trained in computer science and electrical and biomedical engineering, and serving as an MIT faculty for three decades, she has held numerous leadership positions. For 13+ years, she directed the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), an academic unit with multiple research and training programs for careers in medicine, business, and research. Dr. Gray currently directs MIT linQ which operates several multi-institutional ventures focus on accelerating and deepening early-career researchers’ potential for impact. Over the course of these efforts, she and her team have established a principled methodology for needs identification and opportunity development, and an organizational model that fosters a vibrant multi-stakeholder community necessary for sustained local and global impact.

Zen Chu

Zen Chu believes that now is the best time in history for healthcare entrepreneurs and engineers to create the data, systems, and products to help medicine scale and serve more patients with higher quality at lower cost. He created and teaches the MIT Healthcare Ventures graduate courses within the pioneering Health Science & Technology (HST) program, a joint initiative between MIT, Harvard Medical School, and the Boston academic hospitals. As faculty director for the HackingMedicine.MIT.edu health innovation leadership initiatives, Zen mentors physician entrepreneurs, early-stage startups and health corporations adapting to global digital healthcare transformation, changing healthcare incentives, growth in emerging markets, and new disruptive technologies that re-engineer medicine. As Managing Director of Accelerated Medical Ventures, Zen specializes in building early-stage medical technology and healthcare service companies, usually serving as co-founder and first investor. AMV’s portfolio spans Boston, Silicon Valley, and China, including PillPack.com, Figure1.com, 3D-Matrix Medical [JASDAQ: 7777], Curoverse Genomics, PathFinder Regenerative Medicine [OTCQB: PFND], BitGym.com, DirectDermatology.com, and a few companies still in stealth mode. Alongside four world-renowned MIT biomaterials professors, Zen co-founded 3D-Matrix Medical Inc., serving as the first CEO for the venture-backed MIT regenerative medicine company whose injectable gel drug delivery products are treating patients and enabling new regenerative medicine research, with a successful IPO in 2011. He has managed and led new ventures for Harvard Medical School, Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Bioengineering, NetVentures, and Hewlett-Packard. Zen earned a Masters of Public & Private Management from Yale University and a BS in biomedical/electrical engineering from SMU. He’s married to a serial entrepreneur/venture investor and they are raising three aspiring entrepreneurs in Brookline, MA.