Partner at Deerfield Management

Andrew ElBardissi

Novel technologies in the medical and life sciences industry are crucial to solving existing healthcare challenges and effectively enhancing life-saving drug development endeavors. That's where venture capital (VC) companies like Deerfield Management have been essential in making those innovations possible.

Founded in 1994, Deerfield started as a healthcare investment firm with a strong focus on providing structured financing for public healthcare companies. During the past 20 years, Deerfield has evolved into an integrated and diversified organization advancing healthcare across all sectors of healthcare public and private. After a number of successful private deals, our firm identified that we could benefit early-stage companies, be it MedTech, Biotech or healthcare services in the private sector.

Today, Deerfield provides capital for private ventures from inception throughout a company’s lifecycle.. We believe Deerfield discerns itself with the expertise to fundearly-stage companies from privately funded to IPO and beyond.

Being a partner on the Medical Technologies team at Deerfield, my role involves identifying and managing new investment opportunities. I started as a physician with subspecialty training in general and cardiothoracic surgery before moving into investment banking and ultimately into venture capital at Deerfield. Our team plays a critical role from the initial de-risking to the IPO of early-stage companies. We operationalize this by identifying and structuring investments. Our team also works hand-in-hand with management teams to solve strategic issues to ensure these ventures are set up for success.

With years of experience guiding early-stage companies, we understand that investments in MedTech and life sciences companies are capital intensive and require time to realize investment returns. A medical device can take years to achieve certification while running up development and quality assurance expenses—reason, the industry's unique nature mandates a high level of safe, accurate and reliable products. Traditional MedTech companies spend a tremendous amount of time and resources getting FDA approval. We believe post approval, it still requires a two to three-year window to generate any meaningful clinical and commercial value.. Taken together, we believe these development and commercial efforts can translate into significant investment before significant value is realized.

As a result, early investors often experience significant dilution that prevents them from generating an attractive return. After all, research and reimbursement have always been a big issue as it takes years for a product to get passed regulatory barriers.

“Deerfield also places cardinal value in looking for companies that have category-defining technologies that are truly disruptive.”

That’s where we believe Deerfield is different. As a firm, we have the potential to finance large-scale capital relative to traditional MedTech venture firms. We primarily focus on capturing value with management teams of that venture's entire lifecycle instead of driving returns from the early-stage investment. In addition, we are not constrained by check size, ownership level or governance. This enables us to participate in many traditional VC investments, including series A, B, and C crossover rounds.

Deerfield also places cardinal value in looking for companies that have category-defining products or innovative MedTech that are truly disruptive. Although companies that work on improving existing technologies can generate a reasonable venture return, they often don’t have the ability to become standalone companies that can scale over a long period. In this regard, our firm’s portfolio includes incubators to develop novel products, and assist in early product design, proof of concept and all the way through clinical trials. In addition, our team carries out back-to-front analysis to figure out how to provide capital strategically and help those companies achieve their objectives in bringing forth innovative solutions. That is our guiding philosophy.

As we look into the future, I believe technology will be a key driver in improving the efficiency of the healthcare system. However, much innovation is still required to understand diseases, advance diagnostics/test methodologies, and expedite drug development. As such, we take a broader view of healthcare technology and pioneer ventures that support those innovations to positively impact healthcare delivery to patients.