In an era where medtech doesn’t get the same love that biotech does from the av­er­age in­vestor, two medtech-fo­cused in­vestors from a pair of key­stone ven­ture cap­i­tal firms — Ver­sant Ven­tures and New En­ter­prise As­so­ci­ates (NEA) — are com­ing to­geth­er to bridge the gap in pri­vate mar­ket cap­i­tal for the un­der­served sec­tor.

Launched this year, the VC in­vest­ment firm — called Ven­sana Cap­i­tal — closed its in­au­gur­al fund, Ven­sana Cap­i­tal I, with $225 mil­lion in com­mit­ted cap­i­tal from a cadre of in­sti­tu­tion­al in­vestors, in­clud­ing pub­lic pen­sions, uni­ver­si­ty en­dow­ments, foun­da­tions, lead­ing aca­d­e­m­ic health sys­tems, fam­i­ly of­fices, and fund-of-funds, it said on Wednes­day.

Co-found­ed by Ver­sant’s Kirk Nielsen and NEA’s Justin Klein, Ven­sana’s fo­cus will be on the kalei­do­scope of sub­cat­e­gories that con­sti­tute medtech: med­ical de­vices, di­ag­nos­tics and da­ta sci­ence, drug de­liv­ery, dig­i­tal health, and tech-en­abled ser­vices.

“I think one over­ar­ch­ing theme for many prod­ucts we in­vest in is try­ing to move them from the more ex­pen­sive side of care, to the less ex­pen­sive,” Nielsen not­ed in an in­ter­view with End­points News.

For ex­am­ple, de­vices that can com­mu­ni­cate with physi­cians or oth­er providers to iden­ti­fy pa­tients that are at risk for be­ing ad­mit­ted with heart fail­ure, or COPD. An­oth­er op­por­tu­ni­ty is about ad­dress­ing chron­ic dis­eases, where pa­tients aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly com­pli­ant or ther­a­pies have side ef­fects that pre­vent adop­tion.

“We like the idea of iden­ti­fy­ing sur­gi­cal strate­gies, neur­al mod­u­la­tion based strate­gies or oth­er medtech-based in­ter­ven­tions that can ef­fec­tive­ly treat the un­der­ly­ing con­di­tion,” he said.

Al­though Ven­sana is an in­de­pen­dent firm, Ver­sant will pro­vide sup­port. Shar­ing deal flow can ex­tend the op­por­tu­ni­ties that emerge at the in­ter­sec­tion of the two strate­gies — such as drug de­liv­ery or di­ag­nos­tics, Nielsen added.

Nielsen, who was once a pro­fes­sion­al hock­ey play­er and has pre­vi­ous­ly worked with Medtron­ic, has been with Ver­sant for over a decade and was in charge of the firm’s medtech prac­tice.

In biotech — where Ver­sant op­er­ates — in­vest­ment is large­ly fo­cused on ear­ly-stage com­pa­ny cre­ation. In medtech, the op­por­tu­ni­ty lies in mid-to-late stage op­por­tu­ni­ties, he said.

“Most medtech com­pa­nies are best po­si­tioned to go pub­lic or be ac­quired in a com­pet­i­tive process for the time when they’ve re­al­ly demon­strat­ed the adop­tion of their prod­ucts by clin­i­cians, sur­geons and hos­pi­tals,” Ven­sana’s oth­er founder, Klein, em­pha­sized. Klein served as a part­ner at NEA for more than 12 years.

“Be­cause of the time­lines, cap­i­tal re­quire­ments as­so­ci­at­ed with nav­i­gat­ing the ear­ly-stage con­cept all the way through to a scal­ing US rev­enue stage busi­ness, it’s of­ten been the case that (…) some of the most com­pelling in­vest­ment rounds of fi­nanc­ing from medtech com­pa­nies have come kind of more mid­stream in that process.”

Ven­sana wants to cap­i­tal­ize on a rel­a­tive­ly healthy macro en­vi­ron­ment for medtech.

“If you look at the ex­it mar­kets in medtech, they’ve been re­al­ly strong, and you’ve got M&A (…) that con­tin­ues to have kind of a sol­id, con­sis­tent pace, you’ve got IPO win­dows that are now open, and (…) mul­ti­ples that are all time highs,” Nielsen said.

Da­ta from Sil­i­con Val­ley Bank (SVB) sug­gest strong per­for­mance of de­vice IPOs should spur con­tin­ued lat­er-stage ven­ture in­vest­ment. Mean­while, in­vest­ments in the first half of 2019 in dig­i­tal health have al­ready eclipsed full-year 2017 in­vest­ments and are on track to hit $10 bil­lion in 2019, the re­port said.

Deals for di­ag­nos­tics and med­ical tools are al­so ex­pect­ed to climb in the sec­ond half of 2019, and R&D tool in­vest­ment is set to surge fol­low­ing the suc­cess­ful IPOs of Adap­tive Biotech­nolo­gies and Per­son­alis, SVB an­a­lysts es­ti­mat­ed.

In the last year, the pub­lic mar­ket has been a suc­cess­ful way for Dx/Tools com­pa­nies to cap­ture val­ue. Ac­cord­ing­ly, we an­tic­i­pate more $B+ IPOs than pri­vate M&A for 2H 2019. We al­so be­lieve tech com­pa­nies will start to ac­quire Dx/Tools com­pa­nies in the AI/ML big da­ta space.

Com­pa­nies in the medtech sec­tor — akin to their coun­ter­parts in phar­ma — need to build out their pipelines. “Yet, there are very few… well cap­i­tal­ized, so­phis­ti­cat­ed medtech in­vestors that are avail­able to sup­port these com­pa­nies. And so we’re try­ing to kind of bridge that gap,” he added.

In the ex­it en­vi­ron­ment, there is a tremen­dous need for new tech­nolo­gies and start­up com­pa­nies. Whether that’s build­ing new prod­uct mar­kets in chron­ic dis­ease, or prod­ucts that are re­al­ly com­pli­men­ta­ry to block­buster fran­chis­es such as those in or­tho­pe­dics, re­con­struc­tive de­vices, or in­ter­ven­tion­al car­di­ol­o­gy.

“These (prod­ucts) can pro­vide val­ue growth dri­vers for some of the large ac­quir­ers in our space,” Klein said. “The ex­it mar­kets to­day have been great, but there’s a rel­a­tive dearth of com­pa­nies and in­no­v­a­tive prod­ucts that have made it to that phase.”

With the $225 mil­lion in their cof­fers, Ven­sana hopes to in­vest in a dozen com­pa­nies, in­ject­ing be­tween $10 to $30 mil­lion in each com­pa­ny, Klein not­ed.

After the FDA lambasted their PD-1 ahead of an adcomm earlier this week, Incyte ran into new trouble Thursday as ODAC panelists voted against an accelerated OK by a wide margin.

Members of the Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee recommended with a 13-4 vote to defer a regulatory decision on Incyte’s retifanlimab until after more data can be collected from a placebo-controlled trial. The PD-1 therapy is due for a PDUFA date in late July after receiving priority review earlier this year.

The FDA on Thursday called to include those with incurable cancers (when there is no potential for cure or for prolonged/near normal survival) in appropriate clinical trials, regardless of whether they have received existing alternative treatments.

Historically, many cancer clinical trials have required that participating patients previously received multiple therapies, according to Richard Pazdur, director of the FDA’s Oncology Center of Excellence.

Gene therapy companies have faced huge hurdles trying to deliver healthy genes into muscular dystrophy patients’ muscle cells, so here’s an idea: Why don’t we just replace the muscle cells themselves?

Over the last two years, Vita Therapeutics has been exploring that possibility, building on early stem cell work from Johns Hopkins professor Peter Andersen. And on Tuesday they announced a $32 million Series A to begin to move their first therapy into the clinic, where they hope it will help rebuild muscle in patients with a type of dystrophy that afflicts the arms and legs.