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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