Mathieu Morand, Director C/Can Accelerator Hub at City Cancer Challenge, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“At the World Cancer Series last week, a Venture Capitalist on stage said something I’d been thinking for years: private investment incentives are fundamentally misaligned with what health systems really need.
He called for changing the metrics. Realigning incentives. Making private capital work for innovation to reach public health systems.
Honestly, why would anyone actually do that and how?
I spent years in venture capital before moving into global health. That’s part of why I left. The deals made sense as investments. They just weren’t what health systems needed.
Because here’s what the VC/PE industry actually does in healthcare: it makes innovation available to the few people who can afford it. Full stop. The returns come from premium markets, affluent/well covered population segments, almost never from solving access gaps. One obvious reason is that the industry needs their ROI in 8 years. Not long enough to bother about access.
So the question I’m left with: in a world where innovation gets outdated at a faster pace than ever, who should and can take over that job and work on sustainable access to innovation? The ones who buy out innovative businesses? Regulators? Good will of entrepreneurs? Underfunded NGOs? International agencies?
How do we embed access from the get-go in an industry which is not designed to care?
Would love to hear from people working at the intersection of public health and private investments.”
