Healthcare Ventures (HST.978)

About the Class

Faculty

Addresses healthcare entrepreneurship with an emphasis on startups bridging care re-design, digital health, medical devices, and new healthcare business models. Includes prominent speakers and experts from key domains across venture capital, medicine, pharma, med devices, regulatory, insurance, software, design thinking, entrepreneurship, including many alumni from the class sharing their journeys. Provides practical experiences in venture validation/creation through team-based work around themes. Illustrates best practices in identifying and validating health venture opportunities amid challenges of navigating healthcare complexity, team dynamics, and venture capital raising process. Intended for students from engineering, medicine, public health, and MBA programs. Video conference facilities provided to facilitate remote participation by Executive MBA and traveling students.

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.