We aim to expand access to affordable, appropriate and sustainable medical technologies that address unmet health needs in the world’s most resource constrained populations – starting first with India and Sub-Saharan Africa.
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For the billions of people who live in poverty, in those parts of the world that are most resource constrained, infectious and non-communicable diseases, and a whole host of other medical complications, are a constant threat. Women and children are among the hardest hit. Too many die too soon or get sick, because they either are unable to afford the right medical care or because the right medical technologies have not been adapted to suit their settings.
Low cost medical technologies, adapted to the needs of low resource settings, could prevent millions of deaths, especially those among mothers and children, and slow the growing scourge of non-communicable diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.
While many innovative ideas have been developed to address these problems, the innovations are not reaching the populations that need them the most, because of pathway knowledge, funding, and numerous other business challenges.
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By bringing together leadership, knowledge and funding, we seek to nurture innovations and get them to the world’s most economically challenged populations.
Medical technology veterans and global health leaders want to contribute not just by donating or investing, but also by providing mentorship and leading the way to real solutions.
The world already possesses knowledge to increase access to life-saving and life-enhancing medical technologies for our most resource constrained settings:
A hybrid model of funding that combines a charity with an impact fund limited partnership could foster market discipline and help advance the most promising, viable, and self-sustaining innovations.
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“Our thesis is that by taking a sector-focused approach that brings together leadership, knowledge and funding, and leverages collaborations across sectors and disciplines, we may be able to help accelerate medical innovations that could benefit our most vulnerable citizens of the world, where the burden of preventable deaths is most concentrated.”
CO-FOUNDERS, TEAMFund
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We have structured TEAMFund to overcome the funding and knowledge gaps that are primary bottlenecks to our mission of bringing medical innovations to the world’s most resource constrained settings to create impact and access.
*“TEAMFund” refers to: (i) TEAMFund, Inc., a Delaware non-stock, not-for-profit corporation that has been recognized by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service as exempt from federal income taxation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended (the “Charity”); and (ii) TEAMFund LP, a Cayman Islands exempt limited partnership (corporation for U.S. federal tax purposes) (the “Fund”).
With TEAMFund, medical technology veterans and global health thought leaders can be part of a solution — a solution that harnesses a TEAM of innovators, cross-sectoral experts, facilitators, advocates, implementers, multilateral organizations, relevant governments, and the most important stakeholders of all: the populations who most urgently need these medical innovations, and their healthcare workers.
This collaborative construct graphic is adapted from a graphic initially prepared by Gary M. Cohen, Executive Vice President, Becton Dickinson Global Health.
Chairman/CEO of C.R. Bard; Co-Founder/Co-Chairman of TEAMFund
Co-Founder/Co-Chairman of TEAMFund
Managing Partner, TEAMFund LP
Executive Director (U.S.), Stanford-India Biodesign
Founding Partner, Lion’s Head Global Partners
Founder and CEO, Just Actions
Former President, COO, CFO, Director, Digene Corporation (now Qiagen N.V.)
Chief of Innovation, UNICEF
Vice Dean and Chief Medical Officer, NYU College of Global Public Health
WHO: The Power and Potential of Medical Devices
Global health has been traditionally linked with the concept of philanthropy, not impact investment. From the generous gifts of individuals, foundations, and corporations, to government donor grants, philanthropy has changed the health prospects of billions of people.
READ MOREMore than 80 percent of the estimated 3.2 million women who die before they turn fifty and the 6.3 million children who don’t make it to five live in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where just five countries are responsible for more than 40 percent of all deaths.
READ MORE“The grand challenges of global health cannot be solved by any one sector working alone. Development assistance for health is about $36B per year while private sector capital flows are much larger. Imagine a world where public and private sectors work together in financing, delivery and innovation to create a world that is healthy for all including the most vulnerable. Imagine a world where innovation helps to accelerate attainment of sustainable development goals. Moving towards such a world will require leadership from committed individuals. This is why I am such a fan of TEAMFund.”
CEO, Grand Challenges Canada
Support our work to develop low-cost medical technologies for the world’s neediest populations. You can choose to make a charitable donation or, subject to certain requirements, to contribute to our impact fund.
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Chairman/CEO of C.R. Bard; Co-Founder/Co-Chairman of TEAMFund
Co-Founder/Co-Chairman of TEAMFund
Managing Partner, TEAMFund LP
Executive Director (U.S.), Stanford-India Biodesign
Founding Partner, Lion’s Head Global Partners
Founder and CEO, Just Actions
Former President, COO, CFO, Director, Digene Corporation (now Qiagen N.V.)
Chief of Innovation, UNICEF
Vice Dean and Chief Medical Officer, NYU College of Global Public Health
“There are many great innovations under development in medical technology for developing country settings, but alarmingly few have reached market and still fewer have reached impact. The vast majority remain today stuck at the 'idea/opportunity' stage.”
Edge is one of the Founding Members of Lion's Head Global Partners, where he has focused on global health financing relating to pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and medical innovations. Among his many achievements in the area of global health financing, he led the team to establish The International Finance Facility for Immunization, www.iffim.org. — the mechanism to accelerate financing for GAVI (global vaccine alliance). Edge is a member of the Board of TEAMFund.
I recently wrote in a publication called “Reimagining Global Health,”1 about the changing landscape of capital for global health. Today, I write about a next chapter effort to create a new source of domain-driven financial and advisory capital, specifically targeting medical technology innovations for the most resource-constrained regions of the world.
Global health has been traditionally linked with the concept of philanthropy, not impact investment. From the generous gifts of individuals, foundations, and corporations, to government donor grants, philanthropy has changed the health prospects of billions of people. For example, basic vaccination is now the norm in all countries, and millions are being treated with HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria drugs.
But philanthropy alone cannot meet the challenges for global health. The world has successfully reduced the number of child deaths by nearly half since 1990. But sustaining the pace of progress going forward will be harder yet. The goal is to bring all countries to the same low levels of child mortality as those in Europe and the United States by 2030. This represents one of the most audacious challenges ever attempted.
If we are to succeed with this audacious challenge, new solutions are required. Whilst rightly there will be much focus on new drugs and vaccines, these alone will not be sufficient. There is a critical need for innovation in medical technology as well. It is excellent that post-2015, global health priorities are now established through the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and there is recognition that low-cost medical technology should be encouraged and must play a role in solving global health needs.
There are many great innovations under development in medical technology for developing country settings, but alarmingly few have reached market and still fewer have reached impact. The vast majority remain today stuck at the “idea/opportunity” stage.
One key reason why the necessary medical innovations are not achieving scale/impact, is that, unlike a drug or vaccine where the same product is used regardless of geography, the medical technology innovations that are needed for resource constrained settings need to be designed with their use setting in mind and are generally not relevant in western markets where the challenges and priorities of the health system are by definition different. Furthermore, impact is only achieved when users can be trained to adopt a new technology, adding additional barriers to deployment. Success for a new innovation requires an in-depth understanding of the setting for which the product is targeted, and the regulatory environment and barriers to introduction.
As a result of these factors there has been an historical reluctance from the private sector to fund in this area. Although there are early signs of health-related impact investment interest and activity, we need significantly more private sector involvement, bringing with it greater attention to market discipline and business sustainability principles.
A new domain-specific private sector impact investment initiative is now being launched to help overcome some of the historical funding and complexity challenges confronting medical technology for the most needy regions of the world. Called TEAMFund, it will focus solely on MedTech innovations, and draw upon that part of the private sector that can help most: current and retired MedTech veterans with multinational, entrepreneurial, and transactional knowledge and experience.
This MedTech-driven support will be both financial and advisory. With its financial support, will come private sector market-discipline selection and monitoring processes to help ensure that the most viable, sustainable, and scalable innovations are advanced. On the advisory front, it will offer operational, technical, regulatory, and other skill sets, to help entrepreneur/innovators accelerate the lengthy development process, and advance the innovations to market and ultimately to scale.
TEAMFund represents a novel and important direction in private sector advisory/impact capital for medical innovations. These types of carefully tailored, carefully targeted private sector initiatives are to be encouraged and supported, as they will help fuel meaningful progress with our world’s new SDG health goals. More importantly, these types of private sector initiatives could help save millions of lives in those regions of the world where healthcare resources are most scarce, and healthcare burdens are greatest.
1 “Reimagining Global Health,” PATH (2015), www.ic2030.org.
“For women, new technologies that can prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and TB by making rapid testing easy, accurate and closer to home are a top priority.”
Leith Greenslade is the Founder and CEO of Just Actions, an organization working to accelerate global progress/collaboration on a variety of fronts, including global health and innovation. Before that, she was a Vice-Chair at the MDG Health Alliance, a special initiative of the Office of the United Nations Special Envoy for Financing the Health Millennium Development Goals in support of Every Woman, Every Child, an unprecedented movement spearheaded by the United Nations Secretary-General to advance the health of women and children. Leith is a member of the Board of TEAMFund.
There is a simple formula for shortlisting innovations with the greatest capacity to achieve the new Sustainable Development Goals for women’s and children’s health: Step 1: Isolate the largest populations where preventable deaths among women and children are concentrated and identify their leading causes. Step 2: Determine the innovations that target the leading causes most cost-effectively. Step 3: Invest in the development and uptake of these innovations in ways that strengthen local economic development. A critical point that is too often overlooked – the secret of success lies not just in the what of health innovations (Step 2), but in the where (Step 1) and the how (Step 3).
It all starts with the where.
More than 80 percent of the estimated 3.2 million women who die before they turn fifty and the 6.3 million children who don’t make it to five live in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where just five countries are responsible for more than 40 percent of all deaths – India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ethiopia. Deaths are not evenly spread in these countries but cluster in specific sub-regions, especially the northern States of India and Nigeria, the heavily populated eastern Provinces of Pakistan, the northern Provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the central regions of Ethiopia. As many of these areas are experiencing rapid urbanization, deaths are no longer clustered in rural regions alone.
And what is killing women and children in these areas?
Essentially the same few causes. For women of reproductive age (15 to 49), HIV-AIDS, deaths in pregnancy and childbirth, tuberculosis, heart disease, and self-harm are the top five leading causes of death, while among children under five, pneumonia, preterm birth, birth trauma, malaria and diarrhea dominate. Innovations with proven capacity to cost-effectively prevent, diagnose and treat these ten threats are our best bets to accelerate achievement of the new global health goals.
Putting all of this together and coming up with a priority list of the highest-impact medical innovations is not difficult.
For women, new technologies that can prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and TB by making rapid testing easy, accurate and closer to home are a top priority. Diagnostic tests that can identify women at high risk of pregnancy complications early on could prevent many maternal and newborn deaths. Integrated diagnostic platforms that include the major infectious diseases and chronic conditions that threaten healthy pregnancies are also desperately needed. Invisible, long-lasting, self-administered contraceptive devices that combine protection from sexually transmitted diseases are potentially transformative. And the entire field of innovations that reduce the burden of mental health disorders among women in low resource settings is wide open. For children, devices that can quickly, accurately and easily identify pneumonia together with new devices to deliver oxygen (e.g. bubble CPAP, oxygen concentrators) are needed to drive down the high death toll from pneumonia. For malaria endemic countries, the holy grail is a rapid diagnostic test that can identify viral pneumonia, bacterial pneumonia and malaria in minutes. And an entire suite of products is needed to retool the NICU for low resource settings, ranging from resuscitation devices to infant warmers to human milk banks.
How these innovations are developed, financed and ultimately made available to these target populations matters.
Innovations that emerge from their country contexts or that are sourced elsewhere and adapted locally by local institutions, often in partnership with external stakeholders, stand the best chance of success. As private financing for development now dwarfs foreign aid by more than 8 to 1, investment vehicles that crowd in private capital have the greatest potential for impact. These vehicles will need to work in close partnership with public sector stakeholders – at the local, national, regional and global levels – who can smooth the path to impact by subsidizing the costs of early stage innovation (e.g. R&D and pilot testing costs), by building a robust pipeline of investable high-impact projects that are ranked according to global health impact, and by connecting all of the partners. And as the private health sector dominates in many of the countries with the steepest health challenges, the path to impact for many of these innovations travels right through local private health sectors.
Not every innovation will be equally important in every setting.
Africa’s higher fertility rates and infectious disease burden make contraceptive and infectious disease diagnosis and treatment technologies highly prized, while South Asia’s higher burdens of maternal and newborn deaths and non-communicable diseases call for innovations that reduce the risks of pregnancy and childbirth, and relieve the growing chronic disease burden. Where investment vehicles can use their private sector capital and expertise to match the innovations to the markets where they can save the most lives, they will make a major contribution to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. For these vehicles, success will be measured in the scale of lives saved and sickness averted, and in the way their investments lay a solid foundation for local medtech market development. Further, where private medtech dollars – offered as loans, subsidies, guarantees, grants and/or equity – find their way to companies that pursue shared value strategies and/or to local start-up social businesses they have the potential to leave a lasting legacy of better health for future generations of women and children.