BioSTL, the nationally recognized engine of St. Louis’ biosciences ecosystem, has plans to address some of the world’s toughest healthcare and food challenges by focusing on for-profit venture funds in two key areas of life sciences, in collaboration with other venture firms. 

Jim McCarter, MD, PhD, Senior Vice President of BioSTL and Senior Managing Director of BioGenerator Ventures, announced the first two for-profit venture funds, starting with digital health. 

McCarter’s team is working with Redesign Health to build a digital health venture studio in St. Louis to build up to seven digital health companies in St. Louisover the next five years. Redesign Health is a global venture and applied technology platform focused on building next-generation healthcare companies. 

“Digital health means everything from telemedicine to artificial intelligence and wearable technologies that enable better healthcare delivery at a lower cost,” said McCarter. “That has the ability to transform medicine beyond what we can do with new therapeutics and diagnostics.” 

BioGenerator Ventures, the investment arm of BioSTL, is also prioritizing research tools and services for the different areas of life sciences, including medicine and agriculture.

“St. Louis is a great place to do that because we have lower cost of living, lower cost of doing business and higher employee retention. It’s a great place to offer contract research services and build laboratory tools to make those offerings,” he said. “We’re doing this in collaboration with Cultivation Capital.” 

McCarter said the plan is to build five research tools and services companies over the next five years under Hypha Life Sciences, a partnership between BioGenerator Ventures and Cultivation Capital.