Spotlight on Women in Health Ventures

Andrea Ippolito is the founder and CEO of Simplifed, the first independent tele-lactation consulting and nutrition support platform connecting new mothers with resources in the first weeks of becoming a parent. She is currently a Lecturer in the Engineering Management Program at Cornell University. Prior to this, she served as Director of the Department of Veterans Affairs Innovators Network withi...

Pooja Chandrashekar is a second year medical student at Harvard Medical School and founder of the COVID-19 Health Literacy Project, which aims to create and translate accessible COVID-19 information into different languages to help all patients know when and how to seek care. We talk about her ability to mobilize hundreds of health professional students to work towards tackling language barriers t...

Sara Nayeem is a Partner at Avoro Ventures (former Partner at NEA) where she focuses on investments in biopharmaceutical companies. We discuss with Sara what it means to “fail fast”, the importance of that “killer experiment” and other key considerations for building a biopharma company. As one of Fierce Biotech’s “Fiercest Women in Life Sciences”, she provides suggestions for how we can promote g...

Dr. Sejal Hathi is a physician, public health advocate, and serial entrepreneur, who has dedicated her career to serving vulnerable communities in the United States and globally — with a special attention to women and girls. She has founded two non-profit organizations, Girls Helping Girls and girltank, that have mobilized over 30,000 young women to create sustainable social change in over 100 cou...

Bunny Ellerin is co-founder and president of New York City Health Business Leaders, a community of over 4,000 healthcare executives, entrepreneurs, innovators, and investors. She’s an award-winning leader, thinker, writer, and speaker who has helped transform New York City into a thriving hub of healthcare innovation. We talk to her about effective strategies for networking and how men need to ser...

3Derm is a medical technology company offering a skin imaging system that allows users to take clinical-quality 3D skin images remotely. Dermatologists can use the uploaded images to efficiently monitor high volumes of patients' lesions while reserving in-clinic appointment times for patients whose images indicate a more alarming condition. A week after the interview in August 2020, 3Derm was acqu...

Wellinks is a wearable health technology company that focuses on building software and hardware to improve treatment and outcomes for patients with musculoskeletal conditions. Coming from a non-traditional background with training in product design at Yale and Design for America, co-founder Ellen Su recounts her experience channeling the motivation to help young patients with scoliosis to develop...

BELKIN Laser is an Israeli ophthalmology device company disrupting the glaucoma care space. Their technology is an automated one-second laser device aimed at addressing the growing disparity between the enormous number of glaucoma patients (80M) and the limited number of ophthalmologists (212,000) by enabling the doctor to treat many more patients. In our conversation with BELKIN Laser CEO, Daria...

Dr. Nimmi Ramanujam is the Director of the Center for Women's Global Health Technologies at Duke University and co-founder at Calla Health. Calla Health strives to sustainably improve women's access to cancer prevention through women-inspired technologies for cervical cancer screening for low-resource settings. With the Callascope, their innovative device for cervical imaging, Nimmi and her team a...

BioAdvance is a venture capital firm investing in early-stage life sciences companies and technologies in the mid-Atlantic region. BioAdvance CEO Barbara Schilberg expands on her over three decade career in biotech from serving as general counsel and running clinical trials at several biotech companies to now being a life sciences investor. During her tenure, BioAdvance has invested over $49 milli...

Cabaletta Bio is a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on the discovery and development of engineered T cell therapies for patients with B-cell mediated autoimmune disease. Their lead product candidate, DSG3-CAART , is entering clinical development as a potential treatment for patients with mucosal pemphigus vulgaris, a prototypical B cell-mediated autoimmune disease. Co-founder Dr. Aimee...

Group K Diagnostics (GKD) is developing a point-of-care diagnostic device, KromaHealth, that leverages paper-based microfluidics technology to reduce cost and time of testing for over 40 diseases. CEO and founder Brianna Wronko walks us through how she has translated her research at the University of Pennsylvania into a full fledged company that has raised $7 million to date. With the use of Kroma...

Ride Health is dedicated to addressing the transportation barrier to care. They have a software platform that helps care coordinators arrange rides for patients to and from their appointments. Co-founders Sumun Khetpal and Christine Yang discuss the origin of Ride Health and building its product as undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania. Incorporating their respective clinical and financ...

Co-founders Sumun Khetpal, Shabnam Eghbali, and Irene Park introduce their nonprofit Theia and their new podcast, Spotlight on Women in Health Ventures . The series will shed light on the advances women have made and continue to make as entrepreneurs and investors in healthcare. We’ll learn about their highs and lows and how women can take ownership of their ideas and translate them into companies...