Bringing together doctors, investors and the innovation ecosystem is a necessary condition to create high-impact healthcare start-ups.

For the past two years, Karista, a European venture capital firm focused on healthcare, has partnered with the Adolphe Rothschild Foundation Hospital, an international reference in head and neck diseases. This partnership was built on a strong belief: high-potential healthcare companies will emerge from alliances between the worlds of research, innovation and finance. By creating strong connections between these ecosystems, we aim at contributing to the creation of a new model of unified development which can have a strong and rapid impact in the healthcare sector.

This partnership between Karista and the Rothschild Hospital Foundation was born out of a threefold observation:

• A shared ambition to make medical and technological innovations available to the greater number. For Rothschild Hospital Foundation, it relies on a specific entity, Rothschild Medical Development (Clinical Research Unit, Clinical Investigation Center, technological platforms, innovation pole and data science pole) to create and co-build innovative projects with academic and industrial partners as well as start-ups. Likewise, Karista has made healthcare one of its areas of expertise by bringing together within its teams various collaborators with extensive experience in the world of research and financing of start-ups in the healthcare industry. Among the companies that Karista has supported from the beginning, we can mention  DBV technologies, Tissium, Incepto… many start-ups whose objective is to bring real disruptive innovations to the healthcare market.

• An observation: Physicians are in the best position to understand the specific needs of their patients and to identify both possibilities of optimization and common problems affecting their practice. In fact, they have a front-row seat for generating innovative ideas. In order to transform these ideas into efficient businesses, investor and the innovation ecosystem, with their experience in business creation and development as well as knowledge of the healthcare market, are essential. The Tricares company illustrates perfectly this idea. Founded by cardiologist Pr Pascal Lim (CHU Henri Mondor, Créteil), this company develops a catheter-based valve replacement system for minimal invasive treatment of tricuspid valve (right heart) regurgitation. The early stage funds have help them to recruit a strong team with deep expertise in implantable cardiac equipment. The product should be tested on humans in 2021.

• A project initiated by the ecosystem of start-ups and financiers like Karista. When they have a brand new business idea in healthcare, these technology and finance players deeply need the expertise of doctors to test it, to find out whether it meets proper medical needs and to validate whether a product or solution is suitable for use by caregivers and patients. This partnership confronts these different points of view and enables to eliminate, from the outset, the least promising ideas and devote energy to those with the most potential.

Karista and the Rothschild Foundation Hospital already have a good track record including the success of Acticor Biotech. Created to respond to the public health issue of stroke, this start-up has been supported by Karista since its inception. It is developing glenzocimab, a drug candidate for the treatment of acute thrombotic diseases, including the acute phase of ischemic stroke. Thanks to its collaboration with Pr Mikaël Mazighi (Rothschild Foundation Hospital) who contributed to the design of the protocol and coordinated the clinical trial, Acticor has reached a crucial stage in the development of its product: the first phase of its ACTIMIS clinical trial involving 60 patients from 6 countries (France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Switzerland and Italy) has just been validated, paving the way for the second part of the study with a larger number of patients.

By bringing together doctors, health sector innovation experts and funders, Karista actively participates in the birth of a new interdisciplinary, agile and efficient way of working to better respond to today’s health challenges and help save lives.

Catherine Boule,
Managing Director of Karista

Julien Gottsmann,
Managing Director of the Adolphe de Rothschild Foundation Hospital

Click here to know more about the foundation

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