On Monday, Menlo Park, California-based healthcare investment firm Patient Square Capital launched a new portfolio company. The company, called Elevage Medical Technologies, will support growth-stage medical device companies by providing capital, as well as operational and clinical expertise. In other words, it will fund companies that already have a commercial operation and existing customers.
Patient Square will be “the single shareholder” of Elevage, said Jim Momtazee, managing partner of the investment firm, in a recent interview. The firm has committed $300 million to Elevage.
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Elevage is currently a remote company without a corporate headquarters. It will be led by CEO Evan Melrose.
Evan Melrose, CEO of Elevage Medical Technologies
Melrose most recently served as the founding managing director of healthcare investment firm Spindletop Capital. Before that, he held executive titles at two other venture capital firms — PTV Sciences and Burrill & Company.
A physician by trade, Melrose still holds a medical license in five states and sees patients each year. He also has held faculty appointments at Baylor College of Medicine, University of California San Francisco, and University of Pennsylvania, where his research focused on biomedical and medical device outcomes.
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Melrose said that this experience — along with the fact that he has served on multiple healthcare company boards, including Bioventus and IntersectENT — has prepared him to lead Elevage. The rest of the company’s team currently includes people with operational and technical backgrounds in the medical device field, he explained.
In the next year, Elevage wants to add more personnel with biomedical engineering expertise, as well as those with regulatory consulting backgrounds, Melrose declared.
In Melrose’s view, the healthcare industry is at a moment in time in which there’s a ton of innovative startups but a lack of the clinical and operational expertise required help them grow sustainably.
“The way that we view our role is to be the sought-after thought partner for leading growth-stage companies across medical devices and technologies, which will seek us out for our full basket of support in addition to strategic growth capital and financing when needed,” Melrose explained.
Elevage plans to work with roughly 5-10 medical device companies over the next couple years, he said. The firm is especially interested in companies that are spearheading the shift to regenerative medicine and minimally invasive surgery, Melrose said. In his view, the days of patients getting large metal implants are starting to fade away as the U.S. population ages and the medical device field gets more technologically advanced.
This is an area in the medical device space that Elevage is excited about, but the two main criteria companies will have to meet to work with Melrose and his team are the abilities to improve patient outcomes and lower costs, he said. Elevage will only partner with a growth-stage medical device company if it can demonstrate their product’s potential to make patients healthier and lower costs for the providers using their products, Melrose declared.
Photo: Urupong, Getty Images
