1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Darshana Zaveri of Catalyst Health Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What about geography? You’re based in the Boston area. Where do you like to invest?

Darshana Zaveri: We’re pretty broad across the US. We’re a very small team ourselves. We’re two Managing Partners and a few folks in the back office. We tend to be New England focused just because of our location and where we tend to operate.

We do have portfolio companies across the US. We have one in Minneapolis, Silicon Valley, Utah. We are pretty broad within the US. We do not invest outside of the US. 

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk a bit about some of the companies you’ve invested in. When they came to you, what did you see that caught your attention?

Darshana Zaveri: Let me start by saying that at the very high-level, we are looking for technologies within healthcare that are addressing very large unmet needs. We’re talking cardiology, oncology, and women’s health. These are big global issues that are unaddressed.

Specifically, we interested in those types of diseases that cannot effectively be addressed with drugs. A very simplistic example I’d like to give is if you have a hole in a heart, it’s a high-value problem. It’s a mechanical problem. It needs a mechanical solution. We are looking for those types of technologies that will really change the therapeutic outcome for patients in a major way. That’s the core of our thesis.

Within that, we particularly like the cardiac space and the structural heart space. We like the oncology space. These are diseases that are a burden on the healthcare system. They’re also strategically aligned with the acquirers’ interest. Those are the areas that we are specifically looking at where we see a lot of unmet needs.

I’ll continue with the example that I started with. The name of the company is nVision Medical. This is a device to diagnose ovarian cancer early in women who are at high risk of acquiring the disease.

Why do we like this? First off, ovarian cancer is a big unmet need. 80% of women with ovarian cancer die. The problem is in the early diagnosis. If you can diagnose the disease, you can treat it effectively. The problem is, you can’t diagnose it.

If you think about why, it’s a mechanical problem. The ovaries are in a part of the body that is hard to access. There are no diagnostic tests available. There’s no blood tests available that are accurate.

In order to address this mechanical problem of accessing the ovaries, this entrepreneur had an idea of creating a device that’s almost like a pap smear device. It collects cells from the Fallopian tubes and the base of the ovaries. Once you get the cell samples, the diagnostic test is exactly like pap smear.

You’re not reinventing the wheel on the testing side; you’re simply improving access to the organ. It’s a big unmet need with a huge patient population. A large number of women are walking around with the risk of having the disease with no way of being screened or diagnosed early. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Darshana Zaveri of Catalyst Health Ventures
1 2 3 4