1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Darshana Zaveri of Catalyst Health Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the go-to market strategy for this company? What is your investment thesis around go-to market strategies? You mentioned early on that these companies don’t necessarily go to market on their own.

Darshana Zaveri: This company did exit. It was bought out in 2018 by Boston Scientific. We did the seed round and led the Series A. We had a new investor come in to lead the Series B.

Eventually, the company was acquired in the fifth year. It was a nice return for us. When we make the initial investment, we’re not banking on that exit. We do hope it’s going to happen. We do have to think through the eventual commercialization strategy.

In this case, what we liked about it is there’s a large number of women who know that they have a high-risk of developing ovarian cancer. The reason they know that is because they have a family member who have the disease. Either they have a genetic mutation or a family-related reason why they know they’re at high risk.

They are presenting themselves at the OB-GYN’s office. We do have a clinical community that sees these patients and doesn’t know what to do with them. A lot of these women are young women who still want to have children and don’t want to have their ovaries removed. They’re coming to the office.

You have the clinical community that wants a solution. You have a patient population that wants a solution. We saw that there would be a pull from the market for this device.

We would have to go through a fairly large clinical trial to be able to claim that this device can now diagnose ovarian cancer. That’s a pretty large trial. We had to estimate what that would take. If we had to take the company through that trial, how much money would be expected to be spent?

The final piece is reimbursement. How do you get paid for this device? We did some analysis on this and hired reimbursement consultants and found that there is indeed a reimbursement code that can be applied to this procedure. All those elements put together gave us confidence that if we had to take the company through to commercialization, we would be able to do it.

Sramana Mitra: How far did the company get before it got acquired? Did it go through the clinical trials?

Darshana Zaveri: If you think about medical devices like this, there are typically multiple clinical trials. There’s usually a very early proof-of-concept trial. Then you have, what I call, a clinical proof of concept. What we wanted to demonstrate is take a number of women and determine who has cancer and who doesn’t.

The company had completed that small clinical proof of concept trial with 50 women. That had exceptionally good results. That would have informed the size and scope of that final pivotal trial that would get the company regulatory approval. That trial is not being done by this company anymore, but that is the path to final approval.

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