The Pistoia Alliance launches seed fund for biotech & healthcare projects

Not-for-profit group The Pistoia Alliance has launched a new seed fund designed to finance early stage concepts in biopharma and healthcare.

The Pistoia Alliance’s Innovation Seed Fund will aim to fund three to four new projects every year that are focused on research, prototypes, and proof of concepts (POC), as a way to lower the risk of designing new products for all stakeholders.

“The Innovation Seed Fund enables us to help organisations bring together the skills and funding they need to start new initiatives in healthcare and biopharma R&D regardless of their size, lowering the risks for the whole industry,” said Dr Steve Arlington, president of the Pistoia Alliance. “This is a great opportunity for us to support companies and patient-led groups exploring new ideas and will give Pistoia Alliance members visibility of unique and interesting initiatives. By enabling more POCs to be created from early stage ideas we hope it will allow many to reach the point where they can go on to gain venture capital investment or further momentum within our community. Currently, countless great ideas never reach fruition as innovators don’t have the initial funds to develop a POC.”

In particular, the Innovation Seed Fund will focus on areas such as empowering patients, emerging science and technology, R&D productivity and data standards and regulations. The Pistoia Alliance states is has already received a number of proposals that are aiming to help patients gain more control throughout their healthcare journey.

“The Innovation Seed Fund is to help advance ideas, develop strong business cases, and drive wider membership engagement into these projects,” added Kathy Gibson, Innovation and Investment Advisor at Pistoia Alliance. “In this digital age there are so many opportunities to enhance the patient experience, this fund helps to make these initiatives feasible, lowering the risk and costs for individual businesses. On average, a quarter of startups fail in the first year, the Alliance is dedicated to preventing this from happening to innovations that can empower patients and improve healthcare and biopharma for all.”

To find out more about the fund or to pitch your idea please contact Kathy Gibson via innovate@pistoiaalliance.org