Alba Zurriaga Carda has joined France-based life sciences company Sanofi as a director of investments in digital health amid a series of personnel changes in the field.
She had spent the past three years at venture capital firm 500 Global supporting early-stage founders all around the world connect with corporations after a similar three years helping consultants Deloitte in Japan understand startup ecosystems.
She added: “Excited to share that I have joined Sanofi Ventures, Sanofi‘s strategic venture fund, to focus on investing in the future of digital health.”
Sanofi Ventures has to date invested in more than 40 biotherapeutic and digital health startups, including Medisafe, Click Therapeutics, Omada Health, and Aetion, and been targeting the sector following the hire of Cris De Luca, its global head of digital investments, from a similar role at Johnson Johnson in mid-2020.
There has been a number of other senior moves in the healthcare corporate venturing ecosystem in the past year.
Last summer, Sam Brasch and Amy Belt Raimundo left Kaiser Permanente’s corporate venturing unit, KP Ventures, to set up Convey Capital as an emerging venture capital firm focused on the digital transformation of the healthcare system.
Earlier this month, Greg Meyers moved to US-based Bristol Myers Squibb as chief digital and technology officer from a similar role in Switzerland for crop company Syngenta.
He said: “We have established partnerships and made investments in companies that power a data-driven approach to transform the way medicines are discovered and developed. We are also working with other innovative companies to harness their advanced technological capability to expedite clinical trial cycle times and gradually build towards in-silico trials. In our translational science area, we are collaborating with service providers on AI-powered research tools and services for pathology. And in commercialization, we have established partnerships to develop digital therapeutic solutions that will support patients and potentially allow for self-administration of therapy, effectively improving the overall patient experience.
“Our goal is to increasingly leverage digital innovations across all aspects of our business, and we can only achieve that by partnering with those who are at the forefront of digital innovation.
“Digital innovation, computer and data science are the disciplines that will create breakthroughs in our understanding of biology and transform the way the life sciences industry operates at a fundamental level. The state of artificial intelligence and machine learning in life sciences is similar to where we were with personal computers in the 1980s – we are just getting started and there is so much ahead to discover! Technology and digital capabilities will also catalyze our ways of working – from how we develop medicines, to how we improve patient experience to how we run our core business operations.”