When Elemeno Health took the spotlight at PharmStars’ showcase event to pitch their clinical-trial-focused software to the accelerator’s pharma members, founder and chief medical officer Arup Roy-Burman felt well-prepared.
Elemeno Health was one of 11 companies in PharmStars’ 2024 fall digital health accelerator cohort, pitching their innovations to PharmStars’ pharma company members in the hope of securing a partnership.
This comes after the start-ups graduated from a 10-week training program where they learned all there is to know about the pharma industry and fine-tuned their pitch decks to try to dazzle pharma members with their technologies during the 12 November life showcase event in Boston. During the following “blackout period,” which lifted on 10 December, pharma members gained exclusive access to the start-ups to meet and negotiate.
Roy-Burman, a pediatric intensivist turned entrepreneur, said he came to PharmStars from health care, where he started the software technology platform company Elemeno Health. He noted that in health care, the goal is to close the gap between “policy and practice and decrease practice variation and medical errors,” which is similar, yet distinct from the world of clinical trials where pharma wants to close the gap between “clinical protocol and the actual people who are conducting the study.”
Hence, “In moving from health care over into pharma it was important to us to understand just how pharma works … all the way from the early aspects of R&D through the different stages of clinical trials to ultimately what happens when we’re taking a drug commercial and following it on from there,” Roy-Burman told Medtech Insight. “That meant understanding not just the business [of pharma], but understanding where really pharma is investing their dollars and where we can help not just with process, but we could ultimately help them economically.”
Co-founded in June 2021 by CEO Naomi Fried and head mentor Shrawan Patel, the Boston-based virtual accelerator joins pharma companies and digital health start-ups to help accelerate deals that drive digital health adoption in pharma and improve patient outcomes.
“We bridge what we consider the pharma start-up gap, the fundamentally different way that digital health tech start-ups and big pharma operate,” Fried said during a panel discussion at the LSX World Congress USA in Boston. “I don’t think I have to tell you, there are a lot of differences – not just language and culture – but resources, speed, appetite for risk and innovation.”
Bridging Digital Health Pharma Gap
Fried experienced this disconnect firsthand 10 years ago when she began her career at Biogen as vice president of innovation and external partnerships after having been the first chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and first VP of innovation and advanced technology at Kaiser Permanente.
“I was in for a bit of a rude surprise,” Fried told Medtech Insight. “I actually could not understand what anyone was talking about and couldn’t understand how the company was organized.”
She recognized later, while working with other large pharmaceutical companies, that this disconnect where pharma and digital health companies “would talk past each other” was quite common. After all, they live in two “different universes” with pharma typically having many more resources, steeper regulatory hurdles and a low appetite for risk compared to the fast-moving, risk-tolerant, enterprising start-ups.
PharmaU 10-Week Training, Mentorship Program
To pave the road to better communication and relationship-building, PharmStars created resources, mentorship, and educational programs.
Twice a year, PharmStars invites digital health start-ups to apply to PharmaU, a 10-week educational and mentorship program led by PharmStars staff and mentor advisors. Since their first fall cohort in 2021, 79 start-ups have “graduated” from PharmaU. Alumni include medtech companies such as Ireland-based Head Diagnostics, which developed a handheld device to assess concussions and brain diseases, and JOGO Health, which developed a digital neurology platform to treat chronic pain and neuromuscular disorders.
The latest “graduates” were part of PharmStars seventh cohort, themed “Digital Innovations in Clinical Trials,” and also included Social Cascade, ClinAI, Genoox, Studypages, Trust, Contract Cadence, OmicsBank, Forma Health, Karneyium Health and Omica.
The PharmaU curriculum is comprehensive and covers multiple aspects of the industry, including what start-ups need to know to engage with pharma, pharma’s internal structure, how drugs are developed, pharma business models, the regulatory environment, and how to structure deals and industry trends.
It also teaches start-up leaders how to “engage and be a good partner to pharma” with “practical tips about how to navigate the introduction, negotiation, contracting and due diligence process with pharma, because it’s complicated and intense,” Fried said.
The program finishes with the showcase event where start-ups pitch to PharmStars pharma members – Eli Lilly and Company, Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Novo Nordisk Pharma, Genmab and Boehringer Ingelheim.
Fried said that PharmStars members join to get “priority access” to the start-ups and to “learn about their start-up innovations and cutting-edge solutions.” There’s also programming available to the pharma members because, as Fried explains, “there’s an opportunity for pharma to think about how to be better partners to start-ups.”
Besides attending real-time virtual classes three hours a week taught by PharmStars expert faculty members, start-ups are paired up with a mentor, a former pharma executive, to help them prepare and articulate a value proposition for their pitch.
“Start-ups usually don’t understand which part of pharma to sell into and how to make that pitch,” Fried said. “We help develop a strong pharma value proposition to clearly articulate this is the pharma problem we are solving. The start-ups sense there is a pharma opportunity – they might even have a client or two already – but they want to drive real success in that channel. By the end of that program, they can present themselves in a way that resonates with pharma.”
Two alumni, Sanjai Murali, founder and CEO of JOGO Health, and David van Zuydam, CEO of Head Diagnostics, praised PharmStars for offering a comprehensive understanding of the complexities of pharma. They also valued having access to pharma executives who helped them define a value proposition.
“Access [to pharma] is very, very hard and the problems that they’re solving falls on a wide spectrum, so you’re kind of shooting in the dark … because you really don’t know their pain points,” Murali told Medtech Insight. The mentor helped JOGO define at which clinical stages their digital neurology platform for treating chronic pain could be a fit.
Head Diagnostic’s Van Zuydam considers PharmStars a “stand-out” accelerator experience in terms of “level of detail, insight and knowledge” and the very thorough education material. He also applauded PharmStars for bringing in experts from various domains such as regulatory, legal and manufacturing and for the opportunity to share ideas with the PharmStars team as well as peers in their cohort. Moreover, he feels that he’s more ready than ever to articulate just the right pitch as needed.
Key Takeaways
- PharmStars is a virtual digital health accelerator in Boston that seeks to bridge the pharma-start-up gap.
- It offers a 10-week training program where digital health start-ups learn all about pharma to help develop and fine-tune a pitch deck for the final showcase event where start-ups pitch to pharma members.
- Since its founding in 2021, the first three cohorts have done 98 deals with pharma and biotech companies and all start-ups have raised over $900m to date.
“We just got back from a Parkinson’s conference out in Philadelphia about three, four weeks ago and I was brought into a meeting with a very well-known pharma, a blue-chip pharma, and I knew how to control and manage myself, and I knew what to present and I knew exactly the points that they’d be looking at so much so that I felt very, very comfortable in meeting in terms of execution and delivery of what we had to offer,” van Zuydam told Medtech Insight.
Roy-Burman also expressed confidence in his preparedness for the final pitch to pharma members, though he noted that it’s too early to say whether what he learned will stand the test of closing a pharma deal, which he hopes for in the coming months or next year. That said, he said that his focus will be on the PharmStars pharma members first, because having had various interactions, he feels they’re “steps ahead” in getting to know Elemeno Health.
PharmStars graduates tend to be very successful with pharma with the first three cohorts having done 98 deals with pharma and biotech companies. The start-ups have collectively raised over $900m, Fried said.
Though, she admits, closing a deal with pharma takes time, often years.
“Pharma is slow, they’re cautious, they’re conservative, and digital health is a new area for them unlike molecules that they know very well and have a well-developed process for identifying and vetting,” Fried said. “That’s not the case with digital health. It’s much more novel, so things move a little more slowly.”
One of the PharmStars early pharma members, James Cronin, senior director of R&D Development IT at Alexion Pharmaceuticals, which focuses on therapies for people living with rare diseases, observed that the start-up presentations tend to get “sharper” every year and said that Alexion has done deals with some of the start-ups, but not as a result of PharmStars.
“There were other things – either we were already previously engaged with a few of the companies or other areas of the companies we’re already out and looking for it,” Cronin told Medtech Insight. “We probably continue meaningful and potential conversations with up to about five or six of the start-ups that we continue to explore use cases that we do with them.” That includes graduates who return to PharmStars for updates and follow-on discussions.
What’s Ahead
Asked about the next theme for spring 2025, Fried said that PharmStars is still working on a theme for the cohort, which is done in collaboration with their pharma members.
“We look for themes that are of interest to all of our members,” Fried said. Previous cohort themes were “Digital Innovations in Neurology,” “Innovations in Real-World Evidence,” “Innovations in Women’s Health/Health Equity,” “Innovations in Therapeutic Delivery” and “Innovations in Oncology.” But the next call for applications is just around the corner, 2 January 2025. Fried said PharmStars typically receives 50-100 applications representing 36 countries, of which 10 or 11 start-ups will be selected.
Fried believes pharmaceutical companies’ future will depend on a strong digital health strategy. She told the LSX audience that only those companies that have adopted digital tools and companion solutions will be around in the next 10 to 15 years.
I think it’s going to become a competitive differentiator for the industry … “I think we’re still in the early stages and pharma is trying to figure out how to do this, Fried said.
