Meet the 30 young leaders forging a new future for the healthcare industry in 2022

Growing up in a missionary family in Guam, Amira Barger knew she wanted to do something with her life that brought goodness into the world. The second of eight children, she started college at 16 with the goal of becoming a doctor — a dream that shifted after meeting a business professor who introduced her to public communications and marketing. 

After working in the nonprofit sector for more than a decade, Barger recently became Edelman's first executive vice president of client engagement diversity, equity, and inclusion on the PR firm's global-health team.

"I certainly feel like I'm putting good out into the world and doing mission-oriented work," she told Insider.  

Her job involves advising clients on how to best implement DEI initiatives internally and externally. She's worked with clients including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Pfizer, and Kaiser Permanente.

One of her biggest projects has been consulting with pharma companies about how to get the COVID-19 vaccine to underserved communities, some of whom are distrustful of doctors after years of systemic medical racism. "COVID made the field of pharma and healthcare really look introspectively at their programs and the way they do their work," she said. "This was a moment when we had to think really intentionally about how we were going into communities to reach them with trust." 

If there is one thing that Barger wished her clients knew, it is that DEI impacts everyone across the healthcare sector, no matter their race, disability, sexual orientation, or position in the C-suite. "The work of advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion is something we all have to have a stake in," she said, "because wherever inequities exist within our institutions, it harms everyone, albeit at varying levels." 

— Leah Rosenbaum

The coronavirus vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna introduced the world to a new kind of medical technology: messenger RNA, or mRNA. Injected into the body, these tiny bits of genetic material make our cells create a piece of the coronavirus, so our immune systems can learn to fight it. 

While mRNA technology has a promising future to craft more vaccines, Jacob Becraft says it can do more. His startup, Strand Therapeutics, aims to use mRNA to fight cancer — using strategies such as tricking cancer cells into revealing themselves to our immune systems. If that effort succeeds, he wants to use Strand's tech to target, at the cellular level, other diseases that currently lack effective treatments.

"What the mission of Strand is, is to bring the breakthrough of messenger RNA vaccines and transform them into therapeutics," Becraft said.

Becraft has a Ph.D. in biological engineering from MIT, and a bachelor's in chemical and biomolecular engineering from the University of Illinois. Strand, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, spun out from MIT in 2017. It's since raised $58 million from VCs and scored a partnership with BeiGene, a Chinese biotech firm, that could be worth $277 million.

Still, Becraft has a tough road ahead. First, Strand needs to prove that its tech can work in people. The approach has shown success in mice, but the company hasn't yet tried it in humans, and an early trial in people with cancer is slated to begin next year. But it could be years before the company develops any approved medicines, if ever. Plus, the deep-pocketed giants who created coronavirus vaccines are also looking to build on their success, creating plenty of competition for the upstart Strand.

— Zachary Tracer

In 2018, the psychedelics industry as we know it today didn't exist.

But Brand saw the direct effects that psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient found in "magic mushrooms," had on friends and family members who had long struggled with depression. He said that at the time, he wanted to develop new alternatives to treat mental-health conditions like depression.

Enter Atai Life Sciences, which went public in 2021 after raising hundreds of millions of dollars from private investors. 

Founded in 2018, Atai is developing treatments for mental-health illnesses by operating as a biotech-platform company. That means it invests in and works closely with companies developing medicines to treat conditions like depression, opioid-use disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Brand said that around half of the more than 10 programs in Atai's platform are based on psychedelic compounds. The company's strategy to have multiple treatments in development at once, he said, was intentional. It's a way to make drug development less risky and increase the chances of getting a treatment approved. 

"Basically the idea here was really to design Atai in a way that leads to higher likelihood of success," Brand said. Compass Pathways, a psilocybin-focused company that Atai holds a significant stake in, plans to start a phase-3 trial later this year. Two other drugs in Atai's portfolio are in mid-stage trials.  

Brand added that in hindsight, he's surprised how quickly people have warmed up to the idea of using psychedelics for medical treatments.

"I think there's so much potential and I'm glad to see that the perception slowly shifted," he said. "I think that shows how powerful data can be."

— Yeji Jesse Lee

Miranda Broz is on the front lines of the battle against cancer.

Broz earned her doctorate in immunology from UCSF before joining a tiny cancer startup called Pionyr Immunotherapeutics based on her research. In 2016, she moved to Bristol Myers Squibb, one of the world's biggest cancer drugmakers that sells blockbuster treatments like Revlimid and Opdivo. Broz now leads a research team there as the scientific associate director of discovery-myeloid biology. 

Her team is developing drugs that target myeloid cells. These immune cells spring into action first when things go wrong in the body, like infections, inflammation, or cancerous tumors. They send back information on unhealthy cells to T cells, another type of immune cell that uses the intel to hunt down and kill the offenders. T cells have received tons of research attention, but Broz said the myeloid cell is a critically important player. 

"I think they're the unsung hero of cancer immunity," she said. 

Cancer can co-opt myeloid cells, turning them into bad actors that help tumors grow. Broz's team at Bristol wants to develop drugs that can reprogram myeloid cells to better fight cancer. After years of research, the first myeloid-focused treatments are now starting human testing.

"I'm really excited about the data that's going to be coming out," Broz said.

Looking ahead, Broz is now working on the next wave of myeloid programs, hoping to bring more into the clinic within the next five years. 

— Andrew Dunn

Ana Catarino said that the scientific rigor that's been used to develop treatments for physical illnesses hasn't always translated over to mental healthcare.

"A patient goes into a therapy room with a therapist. They have a conversation and the patient's symptoms get better, but we didn't really know what was really happening in that therapy room," Catarino said.

Ieso, which is headquartered in Cambridge, England, is a message-based online-therapy platform where Catarino works as the director of clinical science. She said that instead of having an in-person or video session, therapists and patients are connected through live chat on Ieso's platform, where every interaction is typed out.

The typed conversations between patients and therapists are processed and anonymized into a dataset that Catarino and her team analyze to improve their therapy services and learn more about different kinds of mental illnesses. 

The company told Insider it's treated more than 100,000 patients to date, which translates into around 550,000 clinical hours and "a billion words of typed therapy." 

"With these typed conversations, then we have an opportunity to look at the active ingredients of therapy, look at what it is that the therapist is actually saying that is improving the patient's symptoms," she said. "It presents a really unique opportunity." 

Catarino has put that data to good use. Through the data sets Ieso collects, Catarino said she and her team have been able to identify different subtypes of depression — which can range in severity as well as symptoms — which makes it more possible to improve outcomes for patients.

— Yeji Jesse Lee

While Ellen DaSilva was an executive at Hims & Hers Health, a telehealth company, she became a parent. 

During maternity leave, DaSilva said she realized that the support she needed as a parent from her pediatric provider just didn't exist for her, and did not exist for many other parents either.

"I started thinking, 'I'm facing this as a consumer and providers are clearly feeling stretched too,'" DaSilva said. "How can we create a product that's just going to be better? That's going to solve a bunch of these problems?"

Enter Summer Health, a text-based telehealth company which just closed a $7.5 million seed round with investors like Sequoia Capital and Lux Capital. Andrew Dudum, the CEO of Hims & Hers, also invested.

DaSilva and Matthew Woo founded the startup in December 2021, connecting parents to pediatricians who can address questions and concerns about their children. The idea is that any parent in the US is able to contact a pediatric provider by text message and receive a response within 15 minutes 

Questions can be about urgent issues like a cut or a rash — parents can send videos and pictures — or about developmental topics like feeding or sleep schedules.

The platform is available as a beta version to parents in the US for $20 a month. At this stage, it doesn't accept insurance, though DaSilva told Insider she suspects that may change in the future.

"We're starting in pediatrics, but I have a grand vision that every American is going to have a phone number in their pocket in the next five years that they can text and get medical care," DaSilva said. "It's as simple as that. That's the ultimate goal."

— Yeji Jesse Lee

People with severe mental-health disorders need a comprehensive care and support network in order to get better.

Stas Sokolin and Sonia Garcia are the cofounders of a new startup called Amae Health, which specializes in creating in-person care clinics that offer more than just medical treatment.

Founded in 2022, Amae plans to create a network of clinics that will offer resources like primary care, community rooms, financial-literacy courses, and vocational training to those living with severe mental disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

The startup's model is based on the work of its chief medical officer, Dr. Scott Fears, who has worked to build out a similar integrated-care system for the Veterans Health Administration.

Amae's first location will launch in Los Angeles in the fall. A core element of the program will be its electronic health-record system, which will aim to track the progress and outcomes of patients over time.

"A big focus and overall goal for us is that we can get closer to some of precision medicine for this population, where we're getting sharper over time," Garcia said. She added that as more data is collected, the company will be able to more accurately predict which treatments will work best for each patient.

The goal is to create a care center where patients will want to go, Sokolin said.

"A big component of what we're doing is we're trying to instill purpose and meaning into patients' lives," he said. "We don't want to just be the clinical provider. We want to be a holistic provider where we're trying to get patients jobs and have them graduate school and have them reconnect with family." 

— Yeji Jesse Lee

New Nursing Academy started out as a side hustle back in 2017 when Tiffany Gibson, a nurse who focused on pediatric care, saw the need to better educate nurses on components that aren't typically taught in nursing schools.

After receiving her master's degree in education in nursing from Walden University, Gibson said she realized that she could have a bigger impact on the quality of care for patients if she could better educate nurses on how to care for the patients through healthcare diversity, equity, and inclusion, and most importantly, emotional intelligence, which Gibson describes as "managing your own emotions so you can help other people manage theirs."

In 2018, the side hustle officially became a business entity, and Gibson currently oversees and runs mentorship programs, coaching groups, workshops, and seminars — all geared toward training nurses on how to both care for their patients as well as care for themselves. 

"My focus switched from taking care of little kids to taking care of the nurses," she said.

Gibson said she next plans to bid for government contracts to be able to teach her New Nursing Academy curriculum at hospitals and federal clinics. She also intends to put together an emotional-intelligence reference book for nurses based on her programs that can be licensed to nursing schools and hospitals.

"While I'm small and started out as very much grassroots, it's important that big organizations realize that they don't have all the answers," she said. "It's the people that are at the grassroots level that have a solution that we've never thought of before." 

— Yeji Jesse Lee

In 2019, Ankit Gupta bought a doctor's office with 50 or so patients in Redwood City, California. It formed the basis of Bicycle Health, an online clinic for people with substance-use disorder. 

The coder, whose news startup Pulse was acquired by LinkedIn in 2013, didn't think this kind of slow-growing company was well-suited for venture-capital investment.

"And then everything changed," he said. 

When the coronavirus pandemic hit, regulators allowed providers to prescribe highly regulated drugs online, without an in-person visit first. 

Bicycle clinicians prescribe one of these drugs, buprenorphine, to curb patients' opioid addictions. Suddenly, the startup could enroll patients much faster.

"And that's important because the motivation to change your life is short when you're in active addiction," Gupta said.

Gupta, the CEO, raised a seed round in May 2020 to hire more providers and expand outside California. Bicycle has seen more than 17,000 patients in 27 states, according to the company. It works with most major health plans, which pay Bicycle set fees each month, plus more if it can hit certain goals such as good patient retention — or less if it doesn't, Gupta said.

But just as the company is taking off, the regulatory landscape is shifting again. 

For instance, the company had to fly staff to the state of Alabama to see patients in-person because of a new law that tightened online prescribing of controlled substances. It was able to see roughly 300 of its 500 patients there, and the rest are still struggling to find care because access to addiction treatment is so limited, Gupta said. 

"That's the reason why we exist," Gupta said.

Meanwhile, among Bicycle's patients who pay with insurance, 70% are still in recovery 12 months after signing up. At an academic medical center, 50% would be standard, per Gupta. 

— Blake Dodge

It may seem unusual to found a company with your parent, but that's what Melissa Hanna did. In fact, it was nightly dinnertime conversations with her mother, a nurse and lactation consultant, that made her realize there is a huge gap in the technology available to address inequalities in maternal health. 

Now Hanna and her mother, Linda Hanna, are cofounders of Mahmee, a tech company they started in 2014 devoted to improving maternal health in the US. Sunny Walia, the chief technology officer, is also a cofounder.

In 2020, there were 23.8 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in the US — a number that far outpaces other industrialized nations. Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes compared to white women. 

Hanna's company hopes to change these statistics by creating a comprehensive health record for every pregnant person that can be accessed by their care team. The platform is also creating telehealth networks of community health workers, including lactation consultants, doulas, and nurses, and providing at-home health monitoring during pregnancy. 

"We've actually saved lives," Hanna said. "We've been on the front lines of catching things that would have gone unrecognized by the primary-care team because these things are happening in the home setting." 

Hanna says that patients who use Mahmee are 50% less likely to have a premature birth, and 10% less likely to need a C-section. 

In May, Mahmee raised a $9.2 million series A round led by Goldman Sachs. The company already has contracts with the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services and DC Health, and the new cash will allow Mahmee to expand its network of providers and pursue larger enterprise partnerships.

— Leah Rosenbaum

As a partner at the venture-capital firm 7wireVentures, Alyssa Jaffee said she seeks out investments that give power back to healthcare consumers.

"Most of healthcare doesn't really think about the consumer," Jaffee said. "We call them patients, and patients are people who have things done to them. Consumers are active stewards in their own health."

The Chicago-based VC joined 7wireVentures in 2019 with four years in healthcare investing under her belt. 7wireVentures was an investor in diabetes-care company Livongo, which went public in 2019 and got acquired by Teladoc a year later.

She's helped build companies like Transcarent, using 7wireVentures' Hatch model, in which the firm facilitates the creation of a startup to solve a problem in healthcare that isn't being addressed.

Most recently, Jaffee oversaw the launch of health startup Caraway, which provides college students with healthcare, including mental health and reproductive care, via an app.

The company focuses on an area of consumer-driven healthcare Jaffee's especially passionate about — empowering women in their own health.

Jaffee sits on the boards of seven companies including Caraway and Ayogo Health and serves as a board observer for five other companies.

"I absolutely thrive in chaos," Jaffee said. "The more things you put on my plate, the more successful I am."

— Rebecca Torrence

JJ Kang worked her way to a dream gig for an aspiring healthcare entrepreneur — and then left. 

In 2015, Kang joined The Column Group, one of biotech's top VC firms. Shortly after she was promoted to partner in 2019, she was presented with a tough decision. 

The Nobel Prize-winning scientist David Baltimore introduced her to the scientists behind a startup he cofounded called Appia Bio and asked her to join as CEO. The Los Angeles biotech was pursuing its own twist on cell therapy, and Kang took the leap. 

Cell therapies use genetically engineered living cells to fix diseases. The first few approved cell therapies have shown amazing results for certain types of blood cancer. But they're hard to make, requiring an arduous process of extracting a patient's own cells and editing them individually using processes like CRISPR. Appia's technology would address those limitations and reach more patients.

"Cell therapy has shown curative potential in cancer," Kang said. "That is an amazing result for patients that are getting really devastating diagnoses. The idea that we can be part of a new revolution in medicine, that is the motivation for myself in making the transition." 

Appia is based on inventions by UCLA's Lili Yang, who developed a process to reliably grow immune cells from stem cells. Appia is growing "natural killer T cells," an ultrarare type of immune cell that can kill cancer cells, out of stem cells. The goal is to produce hundreds, if not thousands, of treatments from a single manufacturing run that would be more efficient than current cell therapies.

Appia's "off-the-shelf" therapies would be "multiple-folds" cheaper, Kang said, with current cell therapies priced at $350,000 to $500,000. 

Appia expects to start human testing in 2024, with initial clinical results expected in 2025, Kang said.

— Andrew Dunn

A few years ago, while working with some 30 healthcare startups as a director at Kaiser Permanente's venture-capital fund, Shruti Kothari found that policy could make or break a company's ability to bring innovative technology to as many patients as possible.

"You can get the right companies funded and get the right products, but at the end of the day, healthcare is one of the most fragmented places. If there's not the right industry alignment or the right supporting policies to scale, you're not going to scale your technology," Kothari said.

So Kothari left for a role at Blue Shield of California, where she's helping the insurer transform the healthcare system by advocating for and collaborating to drive change in areas such as payment innovation, data sharing, and health equity as the head of industry initiatives.

Kothari's team has worked to get legislation passed in California to enable the exchange of healthcare data between organizations and patients.

It has also partnered with the Purchaser Business Group on Health and other organizations to get five California health insurers to agree to a common strategy around transforming how they pay for primary care, she said. If it works, the initiative could lead to better primary care and health outcomes for patients and lower costs for their employers and insurers.

"It requires a lot of trust building, it can move slow, but when you get wins, it's foundational and affects millions of lives," Kothari said of bringing industry players together.

Outside of her day job, Kothari started Women of Community, an organization focused on increasing the representation of women of color in healthcare leadership roles. 

She also cofounded Crown Society, a startup that equips family caregivers with information and personal-care products they need to take care of their aging seniors. It's currently raising seed capital.

— Shelby Livingston

When Arthur Kuan was in his third year at the University of Pennsylvania, he made the choice to graduate early. And rather than his initial plan of pursuing a doctorate in biology, he started working as an investor at Ally Bridge Group out of Shanghai.

His goal was to build a career backing cancer drugmakers, an area that became personal when his dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in Kuan's first few years in venture capital. 

Ally Bridge in 2013 had invested in a biotech company founded in 2010 now known as CG Oncology. The company was developing a treatment for bladder cancer that uses a genetically modified virus to target and kill bladder-cancer cells. 

In 2016, Kuan joined California-based CG as CEO. In that role, he's worked to bring more focus to the company's strategy. 

"From there, we actually had to restructure the company, really trim down and stay focused on areas where we have an advantage in and continue to resolve some of the challenges that we've seen in different aspects of building a company," Kuan said. 

In the six years since, CG has inked partnerships with major pharmaceutical companies like Roche and Bristol-Myers Squibb to test how CG's oncolytic virus works alongside other cancer immunotherapy treatments in people with bladder cancer. 

In June, CG presented data on 24 bladder-cancer patients who didn't respond to earlier treatments. In the trial, which tested CG's treatment alongside Merck's cancer drug Keytruda, 22 patients didn't have signs of cancer after treatment in the first three months.

The experimental treatment is currently in phase 3 trials, and Kuan said he's hoping to be ready to file for FDA approval in the US in 2024. 

— Lydia Ramsey Pflanzer

Dr. Phillip Liu was raised in Beijing by his grandparents until they both died when he was a child.

That loss cemented his desire to make healthcare better.

Liu, who came to the US when he was 8, began volunteering at the National Institutes of Health when he was in high school. He started his career doing cancer-drug-development research at the National Cancer Institute before heading to Duke University to become a doctor and get a business degree.

By the end of his residency, he realized he didn't want to practice medicine — he wanted to change it. 

"I made up my mind early on that I really wanted to solve one healthcare problem in my career, really make a dent in it," Liu said.

Now he's working on solving a number of big problems as vice president of healthcare at the venture studio Atomic, which he joined in 2021. Atomic recruits founders to build new companies in partnership with the venture studio's own team. It exclusively funds the startups it creates.

Liu is building half a dozen startups in areas such as mental health, dermatology, senior care, and cancer care. The startups, which range from companies offering therapeutics and medical devices, to digital health and value-based care companies, have not been publicly announced yet. 

Atomic is behind healthcare companies like Hims & Hers, which offers products like birth control and erectile-dysfunction medicine online, and Found, a virtual weight-loss program.

"We get to pick problems that are impactful, because we're not traditional VCs that look at thousands of pitch decks and get to decide one or two that we invest in per year," Liu said. "We really get to pick the problems and the patient populations that really have the biggest unmet need and a need for disruptive technology."

The big problem that he really wants to tackle? Senior care. 

"Growing up with my grandparents and seeing my own parents kind of get into that age, it's a very frail population and they're contributing to the majority of the cost," he said.

— Shelby Livingston

In 2015, Nate Maslak, a former McKinsey consultant and data pro, went to Harvard Business School, where he met Nate Fox, his future cofounder and chief technology officer.

The two traded stories about run-ins with the healthcare industry. Maslak's mother had recently spent thousands of dollars trying to find a doctor for joint pain before giving up. In contrast, Fox was born hearing impaired, but with intervention now has full hearing. 

The first iteration of their company, an online tool to help patients find doctors, flopped. It was based on the loads of inaccurate provider information out there. Customers complained that they were driving to doctors' offices and finding banks. 

They started building their own dataset instead, and soon competitors wanted to buy it, Maslak said. It turned out everyone was trying to solve the same problem, he said. 

"We decided that we would actually reposition our entire company to help solve this problem as an infrastructure layer," he said. 

In 2018, they pivoted the company, now named Ribbon Health and based in New York. 

Health plans use it to fix their inaccurate provider directories. Health systems use it to find the right doctors for referrals, a piece of the business that grew out of the pandemic's pressure on providers to find other places for patients to go, Maslak said. 

In the last 12 months, Ribbon has been behind the scenes of more than 10 million people's care decisions, he said. 

"We also have a long way to go because 10 million is a rounding error in the total US population seeking healthcare at any given time," Maslak said.

— Blake Dodge

This slide has been corrected to note that Nate Fox was the cofounder whom Maslak met in 2015, and that their company is now named Ribbon Health and is based in New York. 

Kelsey Mellard was visiting a surgery center when medical specialists pulled her aside: "Fix our clinic!" they begged. 

Wait times were up to eight weeks, and patients who could have been treated with physical therapy were showing up for help these doctors couldn't provide, Mellard recalled.

She was an ideal person to ask, having been an early employee of the US Department of Health and Human Services' Innovation Center before working on policy at UnitedHealth Group and later helping to build the startups NaviHealth and Honor.

Mellard started thinking of ways to ensure patients found themselves at the specialists' clinic at the right time. But she soon realized the answer was not in how specialty clinics triaged patients, but how primary-care doctors handled complex patients. 

"If primary-care providers were in value-based care and incentivized to avoid unnecessary referrals, we could create a path for them to get their answers as opposed to just refer out" to specialists, Mellard explained.

That concept led to the creation of Sitka, the startup Mellard founded in 2018 to provide virtual specialist consults so primary-care doctors can keep patients in their clinics, and patients can avoid another appointment and expensive copayment.

Sitka clinched $14 million in a funding round that closed in January 2021, and the company has scored deals with primary-care organizations Aledade and ChenMed, insurers Aetna and SCAN Health Plan, and the health-services giant Optum. Mellard has navigated this growth while expanding her own family: She had her first child, Dalman, in September 2021. 

Sitka is "a no-brainer" kind of service that every clinician should use, Mellard said.

"What I'm most proud of is being able to build an organization that we wake up every day knowing that people's lives are better as a result of what we've built," she said.

— Shelby Livingston

Mara Molinello has spent most of the past decade launching new drugs for rare diseases, an often neglected and underserved patient population. 

After stints at the drugmakers Shire and Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Molinello is now responsible for the US business of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, a $25 billion Cambridge-based biotech with five approved medicines based off its genetic platform called RNA interference that treat serious conditions like acute hepatic porphyria and primary hyperoxaluria type 1.

As Alnylam starts to research common illnesses like Alzheimer's disease, obesity, and gout, Molinello said she's focused on helping make the business case for rare-disease research. She said the biotech is poised to take their RNAi technology beyond rare diseases, while "staying true" to people with rare diseases, as so many uncommon illnesses still don't have good treatments. 

"The unmet need is there, and it's major," Molinello said. "There's a lot of people out there that still don't have an answer." 

Molinello is also open about her own professional ambitions. She's already built a career in the drug industry after emigrating from Italy to the US and growing into increasingly bigger roles. Within the next decade or so, she said she hopes to lead a biotech.

"I definitely would like to be a CEO in biotech," she said. "That's the goal and what I'm striving towards." 

— Andrew Dunn

Dr. Alex Oshmyansky started college at 13. He was studying theoretical physics, but decided to become a doctor instead, he told Insider.

During a radiology fellowship, he saw patients die from not being able to afford their medications. Later, a Big Pharma scandal fired him up to start a nonprofit to make drugs and sell them at cost.

"I went around for the better part of three years kind of hat-in-hand trying to raise financing for that entity and did not succeed — failed spectacularly," Oshmyansky said.

He changed the company to a benefit corporation, finally won seed money, and in 2018 sent a cold email to Mark Cuban. To Oshmyansky's surprise, the billionaire decided to back the entire company.

They changed the startup's name to Mark Cuban Cost Plug Drug Company and set out to shake up the drug-supply chain.

One part will eventually make the medications most vulnerable to shortages, primarily for hospitals, in a factory in Dallas, the startup's headquarters.

"We make the medications nobody else wants to make either because the market is too small or the margins are too thin," Oshmyansky said.

The other division buys drugs from manufacturers, increases the price by less than MCCPDC's competitors, and sells them to patients online and as an employee benefit. 

Take the chemotherapy drug called Imatinib. The price set by the manufacturer, which is artificially inflated to account for negotiations, can approach $10,000 for a month's supply, he said. 

After the intermediaries take a cut of whatever discount they can offer groups like employers from that initial price, some patients have told MCCPDC they are paying upward of $2,000, Oshmyansky said.

"We charge $39 dollars for that same month's supply," he said. "That's a very extreme example, but that same dynamic happens over and over again." 

— Blake Dodge

When Hinge Health CEO Daniel Perez was 12, he broke an arm and a leg in a biking accident. One helicopter flight to the hospital, three surgeries, and a year of physical therapy later, he'd recovered — and learned a lot about the shortcomings of musculoskeletal care in the process.

For one, Perez struggled to replicate the in-person physical-therapy sessions on his own at home. And though his family had insurance, with his mother working as a substitute teacher and his father washing dishes at Denny's, Perez said the copays from the physical therapy visits quickly added up.

In 2015, Perez decided to create a more equitable, convenient way of delivering musculoskeletal care by founding Hinge Health with Gabriel Mecklenburg.

The platform provides virtual physical therapy and surgical rehab from a specialized care team to treat ailments like back and joint pain. With wearable sensors, along with Hinge Health's app, users can track their movements and get feedback in real time.

Employers contract with Hinge Health to give their workers access, with no additional costs like copays for the employee.

Hinge now works with over 750 companies like Boeing, Salesforce, and US Foods. Hinge Health last raised $600 million in October 2021 at a $6.2 billion valuation.

But Hinge Health's growth isn't what makes Perez feel most fulfilled. Instead, he recalled receiving a picture sent by a member who, after years of back pain, waved a Hinge Health banner at the top of a mountain he'd just climbed.

"It's those little things that make us proud, because we're giving people their lives back," he said.

— Rebecca Torrence

Dr. Harry Ritter joined the insurance startup Oscar Health at a difficult time. 

His father was dying, and Ritter sought therapy to cope. Finding a good therapist was challenging, but worth it, he said.

"Because I had this really good experience, I wanted to bring mental health right into the primary-care clinic," Ritter said.

So he built the Oscar Center, a Brooklyn clinic where family doctors and mental-health professionals cared for patients together.

Shortly after its launch in 2016, the wait list for follow-up sessions became "crazy," Ritter said, and referrals to nearby therapists were difficult to arrange.

Ritter interviewed scores of behavioral-health clinicians, finding that many actually wanted more patients, but they lacked the resources to deal with insurance claims and patient outreach. What's more, they told Ritter that solo practice was lonely.

Ritter founded Alma in the fall of 2017 to connect therapists to patients and to each other. 

Alma started out mostly making money from two stylish coworking spaces in New York. But when the coronavirus pandemic hit, Alma providers transitioned to virtual visits.

"We really had to look ourselves in the mirror and say, 'Do we believe in this?'" Ritter said. "And if so, let's double down on what we know is working." 

The startup launched a suite of tools to help providers run their practices and deepened its relationships with health plans. 

Today, Alma processes providers' in-network visits with insurers, helping them be more accessible to patients, Ritter said. Alma has raised $90.5 million in venture funding from backers like Optum Ventures and Tusk Venture Partners.

More than 7,000 providers are using Alma, and more than 90% of their sessions are covered by insurance, Ritter said. Alma is also working with health plans to reach primary-care groups that need to refer people for mental-health care, he said.

— Blake Dodge

Kristina Saffran has been fighting to expand access to eating-disorder treatment since she was 15 years old. 

In 2008, Saffran started Project HEAL, a nonprofit providing cash assistance and other resources to people seeking eating-disorder treatment, while navigating her own recovery from anorexia nervosa.

But when she went to college to study psychology, she learned that few eating-disorder-treatment models were backed up by solid evidence.

"I realized, oh my God, I'm raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for treatments that don't work," she said.

Eleven years after Project HEAL's start in 2019, Saffran launched Equip to bring effective eating-disorder treatments to children and young adults.

The startup uses a virtual approach to family-based treatment, a leading evidence-based treatment for eating disorders that involves the child's whole family in their recovery. 

Family-based treatment includes a parent or caregiver monitoring the child's food intake to help reestablish healthy eating patterns. Equip's version includes a five-person care team, including a therapist, dietitian, physician, peer mentor, and family mentor.

"It was so hard to bring myself to do the behaviors that I needed to do to get better that I just couldn't do them without support," Saffran said of her own experience with family-based treatment. "There was a certain amount of relief in my parents taking away those choices from me."

The startup partners with insurers like UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, and Elevance Health to cover the treatments, and is backed by big names in venture capital, landing $58 million in series B funding in February from investors like Tiger Global, General Catalyst, and Optum Ventures.

Equip currently treats patients ages 6 to 24, and Saffran said the startup will expand access to its platform to adults aged 25 and up in early 2023.

— Rebecca Torrence

Dr. Jacqueline Shreibati learned to code while she was training as a cardiologist at Stanford University. 

Coding her way through Medicare claims, she pinpointed a direct relationship between the introduction of a new technology and subsequent surgery rates, she said.  

"If you installed a CT scanner or an MRI scanner in my hometown of St. Petersburg, Florida, well, you've got a lot more people getting lower back surgery," Shrebati said. 

Hungry for work that could help patients outside the traditional system, Shreibati left her academic medical career around 2016.

She landed her first role in digital health at AliveCor. Shreibati drove the company's regulatory strategy while it became the first to have an FDA-cleared accessory for the Apple Watch. 

In 2019, Shreibati was captivated by Google's push into healthcare. She now leads a team of physicians supporting Google's health work with Androids and a growing list of wearables such as the Pixel watch and Fitbit trackers. 

As Fitbit's clinical lead, Shreibati steered its irregular rhythm notification through the regulatory approval process earlier this year. More than 2 million users have signed up for the experience, which can tell users when they show signs of the blood-clot-causing heart condition atrial fibrillation.

Shreibati is helping Fitbit think beyond the average consumer. She's advising Google's product managers about how the data can be more useful for clinicians, for instance. 

The potential of wearables plays out in her clinical practice. Shreibati has cared for patients with atrial fibrillation who don't have homes or transportation. In lieu of clinic visits, if they don't have symptoms, they can email her their EKG recordings, she said.  

"We're trying to make it more useful for more people," she said. "But there are definitely unexpected ways where digital health technology can really be meeting people where they are."

— Blake Dodge

Growing up in the US Virgin Islands, Elenoe "Crew" Smith knew more people that had sickle-cell disease than cancer.

That inspired her to find a way to help people with the genetic blood disease, which predominantly affects Black people and has been neglected for decades by drug companies.

After graduating from Princeton and earning a Ph.D. in molecular biology at Yale, Smith dove into the genetic cause of sickle-cell disease at Boston Children's Hospital. Her research in the mid-2010s helped home in on the disease's key genetic culprit.

The findings spurred a flurry of activity to develop treatments. In 2017, she joined the Boston-based biotech Vertex Pharmaceuticals to translate that lab research into real-world impact. She's now director of molecular and cell biology at Vertex.

Vertex's sickle-cell gene-editing program has produced headline-grabbing clinical results, but Smith is working on an earlier and less heralded program. Smith's team is researching pills as a treatment option. Currently, gene-editing requires a bone-marrow transplant, an expensive and serious procedure that involves chemotherapy.

That requirement will likely limit its worldwide usefulness, Smith said, opening the need for other treatments that are less complex and easier to make available.

"If you think about a gene therapy, in its current state, it can only be used in places that have the healthcare infrastructure to support that," Smith said.

Smith said she hopes to test a pill that can treat sickle-cell disease in people in the next five to 10 years, but declined to provide an exact development timeline.

— Andrew Dunn

Halle Tecco never planned to start Natalist. Instead, she wanted to invest in a company just like it.

By Tecco's own admission, she was "an investor, not an operator." She cofounded the digital-health-investment firm Rock Health during her second year at Harvard Business School, and spent the next eight years in San Francisco, leading the VC firm to invest in digital-health startups like Omada Health and Collective Health.

After moving to New York City in 2016, Tecco became fascinated with problems she saw in fertility care while experiencing her own struggles with infertility. 

"Even though I felt I knew a lot about healthcare, I had a hard time sifting through fact and fiction," she said. "There's a lot of junk peddled to women who are in a vulnerable position, spending the time and money because they have this goal in mind."

When Tecco realized she had "too many opinions" about the type of startup she was looking to invest in, she started Natalist, a women's-health startup offering education and products for fertility care and pregnancy, in 2019.

Everly Health, the parent company of health-testing-kit brand Everlywell, acquired Natalist in October. 

The deal bumped Tecco to executive vice president of women's health at Everly Health, where she leads the company's women's health strategy. Part of that strategy is to expand its offerings based on consumer feedback, like Natalist's new at-home fertility tests announced in June.

Tecco also teaches a course on digital-health investing at Columbia Business School, and she has a podcast, called "The Heart of Healthcare," where she interviews leaders like Mark Cuban and Anne Wojcicki.

Plus, she's backed digital-health companies like Cityblock Health, Kindbody, and Tia as an angel investor.

— Rebecca Torrence

Both inside and outside the lab, Terrence Turner is obsessed with making models. 

As a senior research-and-discovery specialist at the biotech giant Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Turner is in charge of the heart of drug R&D: mouse testing. His team uses next-generation genome sequencing and bioinformatic algorithms to learn more about potential genetic targets, ultimately turning those targets into potential drug candidates.

Turner was involved in Regeneron's response to COVID-19, with the company developing an antibody drug that won US emergency authorization in November 2020. His mouse research helped uncover valuable genetic insights about the coronavirus and how it gets inside of human cells, enabling the company to develop a drug in less than a year. His team is now looking to apply that pandemic experience to other programs.

"We're finding ways to work that into our normal workflow and build fast-track targets versus normal-priority targets," Turner said. "We're learning from that experience in 2020 and bringing in that efficiency that we did out of necessity in 2020, but folding it into our process."

Beyond the lab, Turner is a founding board member for a new middle school in Mount Vernon, a city in New York's Westchester County, focused on Black and Latino children. Intellectus Preparatory Charter School will prioritize STEM education, financial literacy, and counseling for students, Turner said, and plans to open this fall with about 100 middle schoolers

In the next five to 10 years, Turner said he hopes to keep pushing the boundaries of sequencing technology and informatics at Regeneron while opening up more schools in his time away from the lab bench.

— Andrew Dunn

It's a challenging time for many community and rural hospitals, as they struggle with staff shortages and strained finances amid an endless pandemic. 

Mike Valli wants to help those hospitals provide better care and stay afloat. 

As the president of the Northeast region of OptumInsight's provider business, he's setting up partnerships with big health systems in which the UnitedHealth Group subsidiary handles back-office functions like billing, scheduling, health IT, and data analytics for hospitals so they can focus on patients.

"The goal is really to reduce a lot of their administrative costs and have them focus a lot more of their capital and time on the clinical pieces," Valli said. 

Valli spends much of his time on the road, meeting with hospital executives to figure out how Optum can help them realize their vision for the organization.

One such partnership is with Bassett Healthcare Network in upstate New York, where Optum is not only handling administrative tasks, but is using sophisticated analytics to help Bassett pinpoint its underserved or at-risk patients, so the health system can focus on getting them the care they need, Valli said.

Consolidation among hospitals is rampant, driving up the cost of care for everyone. Optum is among the companies collecting physician practices, though it's steered clear of purchasing hospitals outright.

"What I'm doing in my work day-to-day is helping make sure that rural and community-based health systems are able to stay independent," Valli said. 

"There's a lot of systems out there that want to remain independent today and provide great care for their communities, but ultimately are not able to stay independent or potentially even in business without having significant help."

— Shelby Livingston

A moment that defined the direction of Dr. Neil Wagle's career came when he was an intern at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston in 2011.

During a week shadowing an executive, he found himself in the room when Dr. Gary Gottlieb, who was then the CEO of the giant healthcare system Partners HealthCare (now Mass General Brigham), signed Partners' first value-based payment contract. 

Normally, the more clinicians did, the more they got paid. With the new contract, providers would make more money by keeping patients healthy and lose money for overspending. 

Gottlieb, Wagle recalled, said Partners might lose big in the first year, but signing the contract was the right thing to do for patients.

It was eye-opening for Wagle — "My mind exploded," he said — and it set him on the path toward trying to fix healthcare by expanding value-based models.

In 2017, he joined Devoted Health, the startup that's both a health insurer and medical provider, where, as chief medical officer, he's creating a new model of comprehensive, coordinated care for seniors in Devoted's Medicare Advantage insurance plans. Under the model, members can keep their normal primary-care doctors, but Devoted provides a slew of extra services to treat patients with diabetes, heart failure, and other chronic illnesses in their homes.

By spending that extra money to provide "way, way better care," Devoted can help patients avoid hospitalizations, which means Devoted's health plan avoids the cost of hospital visits, Wagle said. 

"What is exciting to me is that if this works, which it is working, and we do it at scale, we can not only transform healthcare in this country — it actually solves all three of the current healthcare crises," Wagle said, referring to the crises of growing healthcare costs, provider burnout, and inadequate care for aging Americans.

"This model we've created is the way out," he said.

— Shelby Livingston

Zhengyi (Jerry) Wang got his doctorate in cell biology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. After graduating, he worked on researching and developing pills that targeted inflammation in the central nervous system at GlaxoSmithKline in China. 

Then came an opportunity to help start the biotech company I-Mab in 2016. There, he had a different focus: He'd be working on antibodies that would aim to harness the body's immune system to treat cancer. 

There were three aspects that motivated Wang to help start the Maryland and Shanghai-based company. 

The immune system is complicated, and an overactive immune system can start to attack normal cells, leading to conditions that impact everything from the nervous system to how our bodies process energy. And an underactive immune system might not go after cancerous cells quite enough. 

"The concept, it's like traditional Chinese medicine, it's the yin and yang," Wang, who's I-Mab's chief scientific officer, said. "It's quite interesting and attractive for me to do this basic research work."

In the past few decades, treatments that harness the body's immune system to fight cancer have garnered more support, giving Wang confidence that his research work could actually make it to patients. That, combined with the limitations of existing cancer-immunotherapy drugs, pushed him to help start I-Mab. 

One of I-Mab's lead treatments goes after a protein on the cell's surface called CD47 that helps cancer cells evade detection. I-Mab's hope is to help the immune system go after the cancerous cells in both blood cancers and solid-tumor cancers. 

— Lydia Ramsey Pflanzer

The New Enterprise Associates partner Blake Wu has his eggs in not one but two healthcare investing baskets — digital health and biopharma.

Wu co-leads the $29 billion firm's private digital-health-investing business, as well as its public biopharma-investing business, backing companies from Everside Health and Waymark to Xenon Pharmaceuticals and Savara. He said he thinks having both perspectives gives him an edge.

"It's unusual, but it's actually really beneficial," he said. "The lines between traditional stakeholders have blurred a lot, especially in digital health."

Part of his mission, Wu said, is to bring healthcare up to speed with more technologically advanced industries — reflected in his investments in companies like the health-data platform Aetion and precision-medicine software startup Tempus.

Wu began doing equity research in college, then moved to private-equity investment at Ares Management in 2013 with a focus on healthcare. 

But while working in the private-equity sector, he got to know NEA's venture advisor, Rich Whitney, who shared a critical piece of advice that Wu said has stuck with him: "If you're really passionate about healthcare, the way to change it is to go earlier." 

Seeking to make that change with early-stage investments, Wu moved to NEA in 2014. 

Wu highlighted NEA's investments in insurtech companies like Bright Health Group, which went public last year. Impacting the health-insurance industry, he said, is personal for him.

Starting in 2013, Wu helped take care of his grandmother for five years as she struggled with Alzheimer's disease. His mother and uncle weren't as fluent in English as Wu, and he said enrolling his grandmother in Medi-Cal, California's Medicaid program, was "an awful experience."

"That inequality in delivery is not unique to my family. It happens to everyone, and it's wrong," he said. "That's what personally drove me to stay in healthcare."

— Rebecca Torrence