Digital Health Tools Are Disrupting Precision Medicine, and Luba Greenwood is On Board
03/10/19
In this episode, Luba Greenwood, J.D., Strategic Business Development and Corporate Ventures at Google Life Sciences, Verily, joins us to discuss opportunities for, and applications of, innovative digital health tools in precision medicine and the greater healthcare space.
Listen to the full episode above and download the full PDF transcript here.
Luba has an impressive resume as a lawyer and venture capitalist in digital health, and she strives to leverage both her science and legal backgrounds to help develop therapies that make patients’ lives better. She says that she looks for companies that have a combination of strong teams, very strong data, good intellectual property protection and a pathway to regulatory success, as well as physician and patient adoption. She notes that precision medicine is a mix of all of those components, and, in particular, a combination of therapeutic discovery, development, diagnostics and big data.
Everyone seems to define digital health differently. To Luba, the value of digital health tools is that they help medical professionals do what they do better and more efficiently, not necessarily differently.
When asked what she thinks is the most innovative area of the digital health landscape, Luba responds that disruptive diagnostic and therapeutic tools are really innovations that can change patient lives. For her, that means tools that address reimbursement, regulation, meeting unmet medical need and patient needs, physician adoption, and intellectual property protection. She notes that Trapelo™ is one such product that is taking on reimbursement issues and causing disruption.
Developing such tools is not easy, and Luba says that they are usually created by two types of people, both of whom need support: Software engineers who see a problem they would like to fix but don’t have medical training and young clinicians that are coming out of medical school and residency and identify gaps in the healthcare system that could be easily addressed with digital health tools, but they don’t have the tech resources or the data to develop them.
Luba works to help such innovators develop their ideas and make them marketable, because she believes that digital health tools are the biggest opportunity in healthcare and in a world that is moving towards a value-based system that improves outcomes at a lower cost. She sees an opportunity in making those tools more precise and data-driven to customize care for each patient.
Luba is heavily invested in developing Massachusetts as a digital health hub. She serves on the board of Mass Bio and is a teacher and co-chair at MassBio’s Entrepreneur’s University. She is also working to help create MassCONNECT.DH, a mentorship program for people at early digital health companies who need mentors to help them figure out how to put together a team, identify goals and even license their products.
As a Boston-based company, we are especially excited to be a part the Mass digital health hub and pleased that innovative thinkers like Luba are so focused on realizing the promise of precision medicine, in cancer care and across the entire healthcare spectrum.
Listen to the full episode above.
Download the full transcript here (pdf).
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Health Technologies Disrupting Precision Medicine: Guest Clynt Taylor
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About Our Guest
Luba Greenwood, J.D., Strategic Business Development and Corporate
Ventures at Google Life Sciences, Verily, an Alphabet company
At Google, Luba leverages her pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and digital health industry experience and expertise in building and investing in innovative technology companies and providing strategic counsel to global corporations. Previously, Luba served as Vice President of Global Business Development and Mergers & Acquisitions at Roche, where she also established and led the East Coast Innovation Hub for the Diagnostics Division.
Luba is on the Board of MassBio and Brooklyn ImmunoTherapeutics, and
serves as Advisor to Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, as part of its Business Development
Council. Luba is a Thought Leader for the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)
Catalyst, Founder for the Pharma Digital Health Roundtable, and a Lecturer at Boston
University Law School and School of Management where she has taught courses in life
sciences, business law, innovation, and entrepreneurship since 2014.
Luba’s career has spanned leadership roles in venture investing, business
development, Mergers & Acquisitions, law, and operations, previously serving as
Venture Partner at Colt Ventures, leading BD and Strategy for Axcella Health, a
Flagship Ventures company, and serving as Senior Mergers & Acquisitions Counsel at
Pfizer Inc. Luba began her career practicing law at a leading national law firm, Wilmer
Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, where she represented clients in securities, IP,
regulatory, corporate, and litigation matters.
Luba is a recipient of several awards and honors for her work in the community,
including the Science Club for Girls Catalyst Award for her commitment to advocating
for women in science and technology. Luba served as non-profit board member of
Longwood Symphony Orchestra, executive coach for MassNextGen, co-chair of
MassBio’s Entrepreneur’s University, and mentor and judge for MassCONNECT, MIT
100K Entrepreneurship Competition, and MassChallenge.