Ten-Year Trends in How Early-Stage Sepsis Start-Ups Receive Investment

Abstract

Often initiated with small governmental or philanthropic grants, nearly all improvements in the detection and care of sepsis require many years and many millions of dollars of financing before becoming generally clinically available. As early-stage healthcare investors are free to pursue a wide variety of new enterprises, innovations in sepsis care must compete in the early investment marketplace by offering both a path to clinical benefit and a path to commercial viability upon commercialization. In this note, we consider the investment environment for sepsis-related technologies including pharmaceuticals and biologicals, diagnostic and therapeutic devices, and health care information technologies and place a decade of investment trends into a broader economic context. Our hope is to better familiarize basic, translational, and clinical scientists with greater insight into how their inventions will be supported as they make their way to the bedside.