‘Sci-Fi Stuff’: Yosemite Investor Matt Bettonville On Emerging Oncology Tech
Executive Summary
In an interview with Medtech Insight, Matt Bettonville, investor at cancer-focused venture firm Yosemite, discussed its criteria for evaluating potential investments in oncology and his outlook on the future oncology landscape.
Medtech Insight speaks with industry experts about trends and innovations with potential to transform cancer care.
Matt Bettonville, investor at venture capital firm Yosemite, considers it a fantastic opportunity to be working with a team that’s building and defining the intersection between digital health and oncology.
In his view, the future of cancer care is data-driven, highly complex and expensive, demanding a rethinking of how cancer care is delivered.
“When you look at the pipeline of new therapies and diagnostics coming to market, this is really Sci-Fi stuff and presents real care delivery challenges – it’s not as simple as a new pill is approved and we distribute it through your local pharmacy,” Bettonville told Medtech Insight.
Yosemite
With the mission “to make cancer non-lethal within our lifetime,” Yosemite was spun out last August from investment, philanthropic and advocacy group Emerson Collective, where Bettonville was a director of Venture Investing, Health since 2016.
Led by Reed Jobs, the son of Steve Jobs, and Emerson founder and president Laurene Powell Jobs (Reed’s mother), Yosemite has raised more than $200m from investors and institutions such as the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and MIT to fund innovation in cancer. The firm stands apart from many other VCs in that it invests equity in start-ups and provides grants to academic researchers.
Bettonville declined to disclose funding recipients to date, citing compliance reasons. But according to Pitchbook, Yosemite has made investments in such start-ups as Turqouise Health, whose platform equips patients, providers, employers and other stakeholders with price transparency to better analyze health care costs, and Maia Oncology, a virtual primary care clinic for cancer patients and survivors.
The interview that follows has been slightly edited for content and length.
When we're talking about advanced cell therapies, often these involve extraction of your own blood cells, sending them to the lab, reengineering them, distributing them back to the patient and re-infusing them. It's a very complicated bioengineering process that needs to be delivered in legacy care settings. When we talk about radiopharmaceuticals where we're infusing patients with active radioisotopes in place of, or in addition to, particle accelerator radiation therapy, these have to be delivered in lead vaults in the basement of health care systems.
When you talk about pan-cancer blood tests, these often can have ambiguous results that require a reinvention of our system for screening cancer in order to handle long-term surveillance of borderline disease. There’s so much innovation happening in the biotechnology pipeline, and every one of those requires a rethinking of some process of delivering care once it comes to market. The FDA approval isn't the end of the process – it’s really the beginning of us standing up a new treatment regimen. I think over the next decade, bringing all of those to market and all of the complexities that come with them – getting them to the right patients, because many of them are extremely expensive – is going to be a real challenge in the field of cancer care delivery.