Event

BioScience Forum: Saving Lives and Dollars Through Diagnostic Guidance

The Holiday Inn
275 S Airport Blvd, South San Francisco, CA 94080

BioScience Forum

"Saving Lives and Dollars Through Diagnostic Guidance"

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As we are all aware, there is a total uproar over healthcare reform, spending and delivery. The facts are that drugs account for only 10-15% of the healthcare budget (depending on whose numbers you use) and that diagnostic analyses are less than 1%. However, mating the medical knowledge from the appropriate diagnostic tool is, and will be, the path for “SAVING LIVES AND DOLLARS THROUGH DIAGNOSTIC GUIDANCE”. Knowing what is the right drug and/or care path for a specific patient always provides the best medical outcome and wrings significant cost out of the system. Furthermore, diagnostic businesses can be great venture capital investments for both the investors and entrepreneurs.

Five examples of diagnostic companies, with which I have been or am involved, will be used to illustrate the benefits to medical outcomes and to point out the potential pitfalls along the product/business development path which must be identified early and which must be actively managed around. The companies will be Adeza Biomedical, Genoptix, Prometheus Labs, Sensys and a new unnamed start-up. These examples will illustrate FDA issues, reimbursement issues, innovative financing techniques, use of partnering relationships, an integrated personalized medicine company and diagnostics embedded in a clinical laboratory.  

Developing ever more effective and precise diagnostic tools can provide a path out of the healthcare conundrum; diagnostics can be the concierge to optimal healthcare treatment!

Dr. Robert Curry is a general partner at Curry Henos Partners, a healthcare venture fund which is the successor to Alliance Technology Ventures. Prior to Curry Henos Partners, Dr. Curry was a general partner at the Sprout Group, the venture affiliate of Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette, which also assumed the management of Merrill Lynch Venture Capital where Curry had been the President. Prior to his 27 years as a venture capitalist, he was vice-president for technology at Becton Dickinson & Co. Additionally, Curry was a founder of two start-up companies prior to B-D and an Assistant Professor of Chemistry for several years at the University of Delaware.

Dr. Curry has been involved with over 40 companies in his venture work in areas including human diagnostics, therapeutics, medical devices and agriculture. He is currently on the boards of Emerald Bioagriculture, Inc., ProTom International, and Sensys Medical. Dr. Curry is on the Dean of Science Leadership Counsel at Purdue University and is the Chairman of the Board of the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences at the Claremont Colleges. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in analytical chemistry from Purdue University where he was a Smith Klein Fellow and his B.S. from the University of Illinois in physics where he was a James Scholar.

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Register Here