Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Steven St. Peter, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Vie Ventures, discusses his firm's unique hybrid model that combines venture capital with disease philanthropy to accelerate the development of new therapies for autoimmune diseases.  While philanthropies have excelled at funding basic research, a gap exists in translating those findings into FDA-approved drugs. Steven points out that the autoimmune field is entering a golden age, driven by insights from immuno-oncology and by AI's potential to analyze data across autoimmune diseases. Steven explains, "I've been doing venture capital for the last 30 years. I'm also a physician, but I'm very interested in how venture capital is helping bring new therapies to patients, and that's really the core of what venture capital does. So I've been doing that and am comfortable with that for a long time, as well as my co-founders. About five years ago, I joined an effort working with the disease philanthropy to help create a hybrid model. And I thought that was ve