Combining Venture Capital with Disease Philanthropy to Accelerate Development of Therapies for Autoimmune Diseases with Dr. Steven St. Peter Vie Ventures

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."

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